Speaker 1: Ask not what your country can do for you, at
what you can do for your mister.
Speaker 2: Chair down this wall, read my lips. It's the Ricochet
Podcast with Peter Robinson and Stephen Hayward. I'm James Blonlacks
and day we talked to Henry also pollster guru who
got it right.
Speaker 1: So let's episode is a podcast.
Speaker 2: You fired, get the healthy.
Speaker 1: Get here.
Speaker 2: Welcome to well well, well, well sorry, welcome to the
Ricochet Podcast. Now we're seven hundred and sixteen James Lilax
here in Minnesota, where our governor soon will be returning
to to governate. And I'm joined by Stephen Hayward and
by what's his name, Peter Robinson. That's right, both of
them in California, where I imagine the mood might be
joy or desponded, depending on where you are. Here in Minnesota,
people are going about their day, smiles in the skyway.
Life goes on as usual somehow, even though the hob
nailed boot of imminent militarized authoritarianism as yet to descend
upon us at any second. Now, and gentlemen, welcome. Were
you surprised?
Speaker 3: I was surprised. I was surprised. I had in my head,
I had thought Pennsylvania might be very, very close. I
had given him in my mind before the polls closed.
I'd given him Georgia and North Carolina and Arizona. That
seemed reasonable to do. But everything else struck me as
touch and go. So I was just wrong, and I
was very surprised. I was happily surprised, needless to say, Stephen,
I was not surprised, and I'm easy to say now, Heyward,
well no.
Speaker 1: I'll give you a I'll give you my un I'll
restate my unscientific opinion I voiced here I don't know
a month or six weeks ago, which was Trump is
one of these world historical figures. I don't want to
say exactly the same, but you know, like Napoleon, like
de Gaull, who's destined to get the job. That's unscientific,
but that doesn't mean it's not true. The scientific answer,
Peter was this. I was watching the polls converging and
thinking this is weird, and mate Silver said the same thing.
And I thought Trump is a candidate who is hard
to pull, and Ronald Reagan was hard to pull. They
come along once in a while, and despite all the
pollsters saying we're working really hard to try not to
be so far off this time. I assumed that even
if the polling air had been closed by two thirds,
that still gave Trump a one point lead in the
popular vote, and that was going to translate to a
you know, a near sweep. And I think it's actually
more than that. We'll get on with Henry. And by
the way, that's the other thing. Darn that guy joining
us in a few minutes if he didn't have it
absolutely nailed. And you know, I've known Henry for forty
years and been following his forecast for twenty years. This
was his most detailed and most optimistic ever. And I thought, boy,
you can take it to the bank when Henry is
that definitive about things, and he turned out to be
exactly right.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 2: Let me ask you a question. Do you think it
would have been different if Ron DeSantis had been the candidate?
Because oh, I don't think. I don't think Ron DeSantis
would have beat Kamala Harris.
Speaker 1: You know, you know I wonder about that. First of all,
I'm actually working on a piece before it came on.
You know who Democrats most wanted to run against Donald Trump?
That's why they intervened with the law affair and all
the other things to boost him. Peter, you may remember
this is actually James. You may too. This isn't well
established in history books. Go back to nineteen seventy nine.
The Democrat Jimmy Carter most wanted to run against was
Ronald Reagan. We know how that worked out, right. I
think we're seeing a repeat of that for some of
the same fundamental reasons is in competence of Democrats and
judging the mood of the nation, and in misjudging their opposition.
So I don't know about Pete. I mean, I thought here,
I'm still somewhat conventional. I thought another candidate would be
a more certain thing than Trump because of old Trump's baggage.
But lo and behold, Trump ran ahead of Republicans just
about everywhere, which wasn't true. It wasn't true in twenty
sixteen and even twenty twenty, right as you had split
tickets and whatnot. Some and the fact that he ran
so strongly everywhere and ahead of a lot of Republican
candidates tells me that maybe he was the best candidate
for the cycle after all.
Speaker 3: In let me see if I get this right. In
twenty twenty twenty, Yes, twenty twenty, Rob Portman, Have I
got this right? Or was it twenty sixteen? In any event,
Rob Portman, Senator from Ohio, won his race by twenty
one points. This is twenty sixteen. He won by twenty
one points and Donald Trump won by eight.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 3: This time around Moreno, Bernie Moreno won by half a
point right, and Trump carried Ohio by six seven eight
something like that. So Trump was the major figure I
in the primaries. I supported Ronda Santis, not that anybody
noticed me too. So I supported Ronda Santis, and I
just thought, let's the the liabilities of Donald Trump are
just he upsets people. He just let's move beyond him.
It's time to move beyond him. Okay, was I right
or was I wrong? We'll never know. You can't run
controlled experiments in politics. But the evidence that I was
wrong is considerable, and it runs as follows. Donald Trump
swung Hispanics into the Republican Party. Donald Trump. It faries overall,
I understand we'll ask Henry about this, but overall, even
among young black men, the black vote isn't up all
that dramatically. Nationally, But there are places where it really
jumped to any one points, as I recall in North Carolina,
could Ron DeSantis have done that? I don't know. Yesterday,
we're thinking about having our house remodeled, which is it
turns out in California it takes as you pledge every
penny you're ever have earned or ever will earned, and
you still have to wait a year for the permits
to come through. In any event, we're talking with our Peter.
Speaker 1: You're going to come visit me on that process and
I'll show you what you get it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, okay, exactly, Okay, thank you. Anyway, we had our
general contractor over and this is a guy who works
with his hands, who works with guys who work with
their hands, and these are these are working people, and
you know what we we we talked around the subject
very gingerly until he discovered because most of his clients
are not Trump supporters, but until he discovered it was
me he was talking to. And you know what, he
and his crews look at Donald Trump and say that's
our guy, that's our guy. Does anybody look at Rond
DeSantis and say it with the same kind of just
automatic visceral.
Speaker 1: Affiliate.
Speaker 3: I just don't know.
Speaker 2: I just don't know, because he doesn't have the galvanic
dynamism that Trump was displaying in the campaign. You know,
for an old duffer, he's got the energy. Now I
think it been if it had been Harris versus Disantis,
ascensus would have come across has a bit stayed in,
a bit wonky. He would have been the Ducacus of
the campaign. And I say this again as a Disanta
support of went back, but this was different. I was
stunned and surprise. If you have told me this was
going to happen a year and a half or so ago,
I would have told you you're absolutely crazy, because like Peter,
I would say, he just rubs people the wrong way,
that he's lost the independence, that women hate him, all
of these things. He got more women, suburban women I
think went forty one forty seven for Trump, and he
increased his numbers there. So how much of that is
due to just a weary attitude towards people's perceptions of
the economy and how much of that actually is due
to the man himself? And the more that I look
at it, the more that I think that it is
due to the man himself, And it's not a detailed, granular,
atomic assessment to the man.
Speaker 4: He really isn't.
Speaker 2: It's just a general wide perception. I mean, And this
is what politics does. This is what politics is all about.
Most people don't go into the voting booth with a
very you know, with a list of things about their
candidate in agate type. They don't. It's it's it's it's
a gut, it's a swing correct moment, the moment that
he got winged in the ear and stood up and
and pumped his fist, I thought, well, that's it. I'd
gone from you know, a year and a half ago
saying there's absolutely no way it's insanity to run the
man to well, that's the moment right there. That's that's
the tr bully moment. That is that is going to
do it. Uh And in the end, I think it did.
So another question because I mean a lot of what
we're going to say has been shoot over again and
again and again and again. But I am interested in
the what's next thing, because there's two there's what next.
There's the inevitable disappointment that a lot of the conservatives
are going to feel with Donald trumb but he does
something they don't like, and the satisfaction and the perhaps
surprise when he does something that nobody ever thought that
anybody would. We'll see. But I'm interested in how they
left the progus, the liberals, those groups are reassessing and
reevaluating themselves because what I'm reading two things. One, well,
it's because Harris backed away from her twenty nineteen stuff.
She wasn't progressive, but it proved true progressive ism has
never been tried. If she'd done that, she would have
got everybody. And then people who have a more moderate
advantage are saying, look, you may not like these people
now because you've lost them, but there is a reason
that you did, and it is a wise thing to
do to look at why groups upon which you had
historically depended moved away. What is it about your message
and in getting through? And to me it would seem
that yes, inflation and immigration, those were the big things
that were driving people and pushing people to Trump because
they know what his instincts are. But it also is
sort of a general, incoherent, sometimes specific rejection of a
cultural drift that people don't like because they regarded as
anathema to America. They regarded as as a strange efflorescent
that flared out of the ground in twenty twenty and
like a plume of vesuvius, darkened disguise and contaminated everything
that it touched, so that what should have been and
could have been a national conversation about a variety of
issues turned into an ideological campaign that sought to upend
a lot of things that people believed that characterized this culture.
Speaker 3: And that was your brilliant riff, James of what was
it three weeks ago, four weeks ago, five weeks ago.
Speaker 2: I repeating myself, I'm repeating, no, no.
Speaker 3: No, no, Actually you're not You're not quite as good
as you were the first time through.
Speaker 1: Well, you did a critic You did.
Speaker 3: A kind of catechism. I really thought, In fact, I
was so I would like to ask our producer Perry
to make a note of this. Let's go back and
see if we can not at the moment, but we
should put it up on the website. We should have
a transcribe because it was beautiful. Give James a chance
to edit if he wants to. But it was a
kind of catechism of the things we know. Trump won't
do you remember that, and he won't he won't come
after decent people. He won't raise taxes, he won't do this.
He won't do but he won't he won't try to
tell you that your that your daughter should accept, should
put up with men, young men in her locker room. Right,
Remember that it was I think the cultural stuff was
really powerful.
Speaker 2: Well, and again not to hijack this thing entirely, because
I'll hand it to you both after this I as
a form of masochism and enjoyment. Listen the next day
to a five hour podcast done by Brits about the
election as it was happening all myness. It's a politics
show called The Rest is Politics, and it's part of
a series of shows The Rest is History, the Rest
is Entertainment. But the reason that I listened to it
was because one of the people on the panel was
Dominic Sandbrook, who is from the rest of history and
is a scholar of American elections to the point where
he is so steeped in nineteen sixty eight and Eugene
McCarthy that he can rattle off at the top of
his head the entirety of McCarthy's campaign. He went to Minnesota,
You interviewed the guys and just great, fantastic guy, Britt Witty.
He was the only one on the panel who said
what they went around and asked for predictions. He was
the only one in dead Trump because he had a keen,
he had an instinctive understanding of what drives American elections.
And the rest of them were all appalled that anybody could,
that any thinking person could talk about Harris's imminent victory
in any other way than to welcome it with open arms, because,
as they said, listen to that speech that Michelle.
Speaker 1: Michelle Obama made for her.
Speaker 2: Oh and Sandbrook would tell them, look, I hate to
tell you this, but that doesn't matter. It doesn't matter.
People don't follow politics or no politics in the way
that you and I do. They don't, And so they
were absolutely stunned. The next day, I listened to the
next day's podcast as well. Of course they were all
experts on why Harris lost the next day, but it
was that same sort of walled off in a bubble.
So people on Twitter are saying, hey, Twitter, if you
just if you just hung around on Twitter, you would
have known that Trump was going to win, Which makes
me think I'm not so sure about that. And it
may be possible that Twitter is a bubble as well
for the right, but they just got it. They just
work correct this time because it was on the right.
So do you think then we're going to have a
productive conversation about what the future of the left in
this country needs to be?
Speaker 3: He said, not yet yet.
Speaker 1: No, no, no yet, no.
Speaker 3: I think there's precedent for this. Actually, I think we
can actually look at history and say how long it
takes for the Party of the Left to rethink matters
and they have to be defeated three times. Margaret Thatcher
had to win three times before the Labor Party in
Britain began the search, the soul searching that would lead
to Tony Blair. Tony Blair was a catastrophe in my judgment,
although for all the opposite I tend to think he
was a catastrophe for reasons opposite to those that people
in Britain think he was a catastrophe. But he was
a much more moderate figure and much more electable figure
than Michael Foot and Neil Kinnick and all the people
who were up against Margaret Thatcher. Ronald Reagan had to
win twice, and George H. W. Bush had to win once.
That makes three defeats for the Democrats. Before that centrist
Bill Clinton appears and wins. They have to be clobbered,
not You can't get their attention by hitting them over
the head with the two by four once.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this reminds me of the old joke the neo
conservatives used to tell was the we are moving from
left to the right in the seventies about the preacher
in church who says, oh, I got mugged the other day.
It took my wall, I got a bruise, you know,
but I want you all to know that I still have,
you know, nothing but kindness and forgiving and compassionate thoughts
towards you know, people who are driven to crime. And
some lady in the back of the church says, mug
him again. And this is what has to happen, right Look,
the Democrats are in you know, we can do the
seven stages of brief whoever many of they are there
in the denial stage right now, and they're very good
at that and lashing out, of course at you know,
white women don't do their job. Who knew that Julia
Robert said was not going to work, and that Taylor
Swift cancel will sway millions of votes, right, and they'll
have a circular firing squad. But I keep quiet, Peter.
I mean back to that eighties example, as early as
nineteen eighty eight. There's a great book about this from
I think it was a minority Party by Peter Brown,
a reporter for Scripts, I think an African American reporter,
by the way, and he reported on how throughout the
eighty eight campaign there was Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton trying
to persuade you caucus, No, you have to support the
pledge of allegiance, right, and he said, I think we
don't have to distance ourself from Jesse Jackson. Clinton said
this on the record, we don't have to distance ourself
from Jesse Jackson. We need to disagree with Jesse Jackson.
Four years later you got the sister Soldier moment and
all the rest of that. Harris was utterly incapable of
the slightest gesture. What here in California listeners may know,
we had our Proposition thirty six to re equivalize shoplifting.
It passed by two to one. Harris would not take
a position on it when asked about it, right, and
that just you know Clinton would have that would have
slam dunk for Clinton. He would have gotten that. So
we're gonna have to see if we're going to another
Clinton moment for the Democrats or not.
Speaker 2: Yes, if you can't come out in favor of putting
people whose shoplift away in jail after they walk into
the Walgreens and Philly Aft Black fifty five, you know,
court trash bag full of cosmetics. We're not exactly talking
to jeann Vell john situation here, but she didn't but
she didn't want to be javert despite the fact that
she ran on her previous existence as anyway, enough of me.
Doctor Henry Henry Olsen, a Senior Fellow with the Ethics
and Public Policy Center, is the author of Working Class Republican,
a biography of Ronald Reagan and the coalition that he built.
Relevant today or not, we'll talk about that. Is the
host of the podcast Beyond the Polls, which is available
right here at your Ricochetio network and on Sunday. Henrew
was the guy who called the Red Wave strikingly accurate.
Speaker 1: Yeah darn you, Henry, I mean, Henry, you had.
Speaker 2: To have a strange moment though, when we learned that
Iowa was going to go for Harris for forty seven points.
I think something like that. So your prediction was you
You predicted the New York Post two hundred ninety seven
for Trump at the Electoral College, fifty five Republican seats
in the House, three to seven seat expansion in the
in the the Senate. I think, look pretty good. How'd
you do that?
Speaker 1: Oh?
Speaker 5: Well, you know, I just I kind of pulled flying
monkeys out of my you know, a lot.
Speaker 4: And just gat it. No, you know, I looked at data.
Speaker 5: I mean, heaven forbid that we would actually look at
data in this universe rather than vibes or my friends
who are feeding me information. I actually had somebody in
the Harris campaign feed me information. I was going to
be Harris plus five. I was totally wrong. Blah blah blah,
And I got an email at ten thirty night.
Speaker 4: I was wrong. Sorry.
Speaker 3: The two attributes off Henry Olsen at this hour are one,
he's the man who got it all right, and two
he's a man who hasn't slept for seventy two hours.
Would be my guest by about now, all right, So
we can't be the only people who want to talk
to you in the to get all this sorted out.
So Henry, going into election day, I have all kinds
of things that I want to ask about now that
it's happened. But at the beginning of election day, you
were really out on a ledge and all the polls
had coalesced around it's a tie. Well, Trump maybe up
a little bit, but that within the margin of she
maybe up, but margin. The only person who was out
on a limb, although she went out on the wrong limb,
was Anne Seltzer, who I'd like to hear what you
have to say about that. But you went out on
a limb and got it right. What did you see
about the polls that permitted you to disregard the overwhelming
consensus that it was just going to be a dead heat?
Speaker 5: So what I did was I looked underneath the poles.
My podcast is called Beneath the Poles or Beyond the Polls,
And the thing is that the polls, top line results
never give you what you need to know. What you
need to know is contained in the entrails of the poles.
So what I did was I took a look at
cross tabulations for partisan identification. And the reason I did
that is because what we've been seeing in voter registration
data and in polling data is something historic, and Gallop
pointed to this in September, that people were moving to
the Republican Party and abandoning the Demomocratic Party in record numbers.
So I looked at all of the national polls and found,
as they usually do, they agree on what share of
Democrats are going to vote for Harris, what chair of
Republicans are going to vote for Trump, and they have
rough agreement on the share of independence. So if you'd
know that, what you know is that the reason the
polls diverged is because they assumed different things about how
many Republicans and how many Democrats there were in the electorate.
And shockingly, I know this is going to amaze Ricochet leaders.
Most people didn't presume there was going to be more Republicans,
so of course they thought Harris was going to win.
The exit poll, as remodulated this morning, says that it
was an R plus four election. I got it right,
is I followed the data, which is to say, hey,
at worst, it'll be an even election, which is the
best partisan score for Republicans since two thousand and four.
It's likely to be an R plus election, which will
be the first time since nineteen thirty two. I was
willing to follow the data. Somebody else was willing to do.
Speaker 3: It wasn't eighty four and R plus hadn't. Voter registration
moved towards the Republicans, at least briefly. No, no, no, no.
Speaker 5: Ronald Reagan and every the thing is you'd win elections
by winning Reagan Democrats, people who still thought of themselves
as Democrats but would vote for Reagan. That's why you
had split tickets for twenty years, is people who would say,
I'm a Reagan Democrat, will vote for Democrat per cent,
and I'll vote for the Republican for the executive office.
And it never got even though on partisan surveys.
Speaker 4: You look at partisan surveys.
Speaker 5: Ronald Reagan changed America, but he changed America by removing
the Democrats decades long twenty to thirty point advantage in
voter identification and replacing it with what we've seen for
the last thirty years, D plus two to D plus nine.
That meant Republicans could fight, but they were still fighting uphill.
This is the first election Democrats have had to fight uphill.
They didn't expect it. They should have, they didn't know
how to do it. And what I was saying in
the run up to the election is the entire for
three generations, every Democrat politician instinctively knew all you had
to do was rally the base and split independence and
you win. Aamara Harris won ninety ninety five percent or
ninety four percent of Democrats and one independence by two points,
and she's going to lose the electorate by three two
to three percent point. Why because there's more Republicans now,
Rally the base and split the independence no longer works
for Democrats for the first time since nineteen thirty two.
Speaker 3: Amazing, Okay, Henry, So why was why did this happen? Well,
the dominant Republican was Donald J. For genius Trump. What.
Let me remind you of a poll, although you, being you,
you'll know what poll I'm quoting, and I being me
can't remember which poll it was. But after the first debate,
after the debate, the Trump Biden debate, I found it
so striking that there was a poll that showed seven
percent thought Biden had won the debate, which would lead
you to suppose ninety three percent thought Trump did no, no, no, no.
Only forty four percent gave the credit to Trump, and
the rest almost half just said I don't know, which
suggested to me that half the country hated that son
of a gun so much they weren't going to give
him credit for anything. And yet while this disliked figure
was the dominant Republican as far as I can tell,
as far as I can remember, correct me on this,
the election results the day before yesterday, where the first
time he has broken fifty percent anywhere, including in any poll.
This guy never cracked fifty percent. And yet it was
Donald J. Trump under whom this movement toward the Republican Party,
this historic movement toward the Republican Party, took place. Make
me understand that one.
Speaker 5: So some of you know, I've been arguing in favor
of a populist blue collarship for the Republican Party for
about fifteen years.
Speaker 3: Yes, And for about thirteen of those years it was
really annoying to me, Henry, I thought, come on, be
more libertarian. What are you doing to us?
Speaker 4: I welcome your conversion, Peter.
Speaker 5: There's always room in the church for new converts. Donald
Trump is the graphic novel version of what I was
going for. And why do I say the graphic novel version.
I think for obvious reasons. And it remains true that
on election day Donald Trump had a forty six percent
approval rate, favorability rating according to the exit poll, below
fifty percent.
Speaker 4: He still doesn't have fifty percent.
Speaker 5: But what's happened is that because he embraced, for whatever reasons,
conservative populist fusion, he has attracted the blue collar voters
who were always there for the picking, if only you
got rid of the notion that they were late in
Christian libertyrians, which was the dominant theme of the Republican
Party for decades, once you understood that they weren't latent
Christian fundamentalists libertarians, but they are actually the same sort
of people who wouldn't see a contradiction between liking Franklin
Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan, which is what Ronald Reagan.
Speaker 3: Such is what Ronald And by the way, that was
what Ronald Reagan was. He always Admiredgan Roosevelt.
Speaker 5: That's right, And that was the whole thesis of my
book and the working class conservative, you know, which was that. Look,
what you have to understand is that Ronald Reagan was
not Franklin Lordswaltz's opponent.
Speaker 4: He was an interpreter right.
Speaker 5: He introduced the idea of liberty into the the Tree
of Liberty, into the Garden of rosevel.
Speaker 3: Watch Steve Hayward's face, the Great Reagan's historian. Now you're
making Steve feel a little queasy.
Speaker 1: Henry, Well, no, not time. Henry and I have been
for this argument. I think you overstate your point a bit,
but it's very arguable, and I think you know, compelling
and by the way, so.
Speaker 3: Overstated to get it through to me.
Speaker 1: Well, okay, exactly, I'm on team Henry for.
Speaker 3: Henry distinguished, distinguished Trump from Reagan.
Speaker 5: So what I want to say is that because Trump
was able to do that, he was able to get
people to look differently. And of course what that has
meant is that people who didn't want a working class party,
people who wanted the Republican Party to continue to be
a version of country club slash hooverright Republicans, the overlap
between people who you know, who lionized the captains of
industry and lionized the captains of finances better than the
rest of us. Said, Well, this isn't my party anymore.
I'm going to go to the party that actually wants
to say that people who have achieved things through education and.
Speaker 4: Finance are better than the rest of you. And they're
now Democrats.
Speaker 5: That's the party of the elite, that's the party of
They are now the demographic equivalent of the old Republican
Party after the Great Depression. And so Trump attracted these
people in droves by making the Republican by breaking the
Republican party stranglehold, the stranglehold of Christian fundamentalists, libertarian neo
con orthodoxy, and saying, actually, with the Conservative by in
from new elements into this, we can actually expand our coalitions.
So he created the possibility for expansion. And then the
Democrats have driven people away that Americans don't you know,
Americans don't want Christian fundamentalist, neo libertarian, neocon but they
also don't want progressively secular, neo socialist internationalism. It's like,
can I have something that's like conservative, that's American, that's
like Reagan, that's like Roosevelt, that's like McKinley. That synthesis there,
and so there's a lot of people who did to Trump.
The reason Trump won is because he won the double haters,
which were much smaller, but they still existed. He won
the double haters by nearly thirty points. So what that
means is that first, the Democrats have just destroyed their brand. Secondly,
Trump has made the Republican brand acceptable to more people.
And third there's a massive opportunity to expand the Republican
brand that Ronald Reagan won in nineteen eighty by getting
people who still thought they were Democrats but didn't like
the drift in the seventies to say, I'm going to
give this guy a chance. Four years success, they said Republicans.
Speaker 3: Now Donald Trump over to Steve in a second, But
I just want to make sure I'm underhearing you correctly.
This is not a one off. This is not tied
to the person of Donald J. Trump. This is an
opportunity to begin a golden age like the Golden Age
of the nineteen eighties, a national renewal, economic expansion, a
political realignment to the center to.
Speaker 4: Yes, you're nodding, bingo, bingo, bingo, how's he? How's he? Yes,
that's exactly right.
Speaker 2: In me. I have a six hundred ship navy as well.
Speaker 5: You can have a six hundred chip Navy you can have. Look,
this is the thing is. This is a synthesis.
Speaker 4: This is not pure populism. This is not the.
Speaker 5: Old guard intellectual triad. This is not country club republicanism.
This is a new synthesis that has all of these
things thrown together. And Donald Trump will not provide the
unifying thesis for that the way Reagan did, and the
way Reagan's thesis was either misunderstood or consciously ignored by
most of the people who call themselves Reagan Knight. But
that jd Vance well, Jdvance well, because jd Vance has
been thinking about it for years.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So Henry, first of all, listeners should know that
I've known you for forty years, which means I have
all the receipts and what a hopeless geek you are.
And if you think listeners Henry's been.
Speaker 5: Want to tell them what I was doing on the
beach in Houston in nineteen eighty eight.
Speaker 1: No, he's about to mention this being late nights and
dubious establishments. But you have the reciprocal receipts on me
for that.
Speaker 2: So well, hold on, I say, let me just see it.
Let me interrupt for a second, just to know what
sort of cosmopolitan globalist.
Speaker 1: We are having here, Henry?
Speaker 2: Behind you? Do I see on your shelf a collection
of vintage Michelin guide books the degree? So you so
you've been around that thing we call the world? Are
any of them European?
Speaker 1: Oh, James, I can explain that.
Speaker 2: We found we found him out, we've found out of
both man.
Speaker 1: No, no what, Henry. What it means is, I'll help you, Henry,
to save your voice. It's that's how you decode the
demographics and of a foreign uh foreign electoral districts, right right, yes,
thank you. I have been and used bookstores with Henry.
When he finds an atlas or you know, yeah, using
an atlas that he grabs and realizes how it can
be used for election interpretation, doesn't matter what year really
even Okay?
Speaker 5: I wrote a great piece on how the Polish elector
can be completely understood by the Tripork type division of
seventeen ninety five?
Speaker 2: You did, I don't I think that goes without saying though, yeah,
tell us something we didn't know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, all right, I do have three or four
specific questions about election analysis, but I do I want
to pick up where we left off, which was, you know,
the ideological aspects of this election, but you have been
on some of the non ideological aspects. Let me go
at it this way. You know, this is one of
those weeks when I love paraphrasing Conan the barbarian, you know,
the what is best in life to crush your enemies,
see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations of
their women on the view right, That's what I'm doing
this speak. And you know, so I picked up the
Nation magazine and of course they're having a full fledged
freak out. And there's an interesting article by Jeete here.
That's the guy's name Jet here. He sounds like a E. G.
Woodhouse invention for Fleet Street. But after attacking Democrats for
not being progressive enough. There here's the following couple sentences.
I want to read you, Henry, and then have you
taken away? Here's git here. The key to understanding the
Trump era is that the real divide in America is
not between left and right, but between pro system and
anti system politics. Pro system politics is the bipartisan consensus
of establishment Democrats and Republicans. It's the politics of NATO
and other military alliances. Of trade agreements and of difference
to economists. Trump stands for no fixed theology, no fixed ideology,
but rather a general thumbing of the nose at this consensus.
I thought, does get here? Just realize he endorsed Donald Trump,
and that sounds similar to what you've been said about
the inns and the outs, Henry.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 5: I was just gonna say, I'm glad that he read
my article and unheard. It's not left versus right, it's
in versus house, which I wrote in twenty seventeen. Right. Yeah,
I mean there is a leftist populism, and basically that
is what he's calling for, is a leftist rejection of
the system. This is lef Moon since UMIs under Jean
Roumin National in France. This is budnizadavarangnestion in Germany. This
is the Bernie Sanders revolution. This is Corbinista, which is
we can be leftist populist. The enemy is globalism, the
enemy is capitalism, the enemy is Christianity, and so forth.
There is a leftist populism and that's what is.
Speaker 3: How do you define populism, You're I'm confused, I confess.
Speaker 5: So I wrote an article in twenty eleven for National Affairs,
where I set out kind of an academic four part
tests which was meant to not just answer populism far age,
but tie it to what they call demagoguerie in the
ancient Greece. Populism is four parts. Populism is the identification
of a people as a people, the belief that a
elite has acquired power at the expense of the people.
That the third part three, that the elite is unjustly
depriving the people of that.
Speaker 4: Which they are justly entitled to.
Speaker 5: And that can be status, that can be political rights,
that can be wealth, that can be any number of things.
And part four is that the people, in the name
of itself must dispossess the elites and reassert rightful power
in their name and address all wrongs. That is populism,
but the key identification of elite as an unjust minority,
tyrannizing a just majority and so good. Populism treats the
elites as adversaries who have rights. That's what Jefferson did
with the Federalists. That's what Roosevelt did, even though he
called them economic royalists. He didn't kill Andrew Mellon or
exile them. Bad populists kill, exile and deprive political rights
of their enemy, and that's how you lead to tyranny.
So America, i argued, has always been populous. In fact,
it's the key to our renewal. Is populism rises up
identifies an unjust elite that has seized power.
Speaker 4: That's and some minority you've re seize power. The balance
is restored.
Speaker 5: Donald Trump's in this long standing two and a half
century tradition.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So look, I have a simpler and shorter definition,
which is populism is when the wrong people or party
wins an election. And that's why, that's why it can
be left populism. Now it's you know, more right populism.
But I think that's that's my shorter version of all that.
But let me all right, So this leads to the
first sort of thirty thousand foot level evaluation of things.
You know, a lot of our enthusiastic friends are saying
this is a landslide, and on the surface, it doesn't
look like the Nixon or Reagan landslides of seventy two
and eighty four. It's not you know, fifty eight, forty two,
it's not four hundred and fifty electoral votes. However, you
look below the hood and you see that Trump improved
the most in some of the deepest blue states. You know,
he cut the Democratic margin from four years ago by
half in California, Illinois, New Jersey, New York, and and
I guess Trump did better in the Bronx than in Manhattan.
This ought to terrify Democrats, and that to me does
lend some versimilitude to the landslide narrative. Where do you
come down on that?
Speaker 5: We are one step away from the landslide election. Okay,
the landslide election is all of that is true and
the little things like remember in twenty twenty, people are
talking about the Hispanic shift to.
Speaker 4: Trump, Okay, which was real.
Speaker 5: Trump still lost the Rio Grand Valley despite a lord shift.
He still lost Miami Dade County, despite a lordship. He
carried every county, every county in the historically Democrat Rea.
This is where Lyndon Johnson stole the nineteen forty eight
Senate election.
Speaker 4: Every county now voted for Donald Trump.
Speaker 5: Is there that our ninety nine ninety nine percent Hispanic
and Donald Trump won it? And he won Miami Day
by eleven points. Okay, so what needs to happen. What
needs to happen is you need to bring the people
who doubted into the full Ronald Reagan won fit with
fifty one percent in nineteen eighty John Anderson got seven.
Ronald Reagan got fifty nine percent in nineteen eighty four.
Anderson voters and some Democrats came back because it was success.
Speaker 4: What did uh you know?
Speaker 5: Franklin Roosevelt brought people into the African Americans voted Republican
in nineteen thirty two, they voted Democrat in nineteen thirty six.
New people came on board because success allowed for conversions.
There will be many more of you in four years
if Donald Trump plays his role up here right, more
doubters who are now burg urvant populist.
Speaker 4: I'm glad to have. Can't wait for who were.
Speaker 5: To raise or who were to raise the flag of populism.
I'm sure Brandy is burning.
Speaker 1: I could do that.
Speaker 4: A populist avatar in Dabosh.
Speaker 1: Yes, now you know one person we haven't heard. I
can't resist this one person we haven't heard from the
last couple of days, although maybe I've just missed it.
Is our good friend and Colter. You've been on her show.
She's been on this show, and you know Ann's been
saying for years now, I don't see why Republicans can't
get over this fantasy they're going to attract Hispanic voters.
Never gonna happen. What are you going to say to
Anne if you get her on the phone.
Speaker 5: Look and had me on her podcast precisely to say,
I'm the problem. I say, we need back in Hispanic
voters when what we should that we can't get them.
What we should do is concentrate on whites. What I'm
gonna say is too Badso said you were wrong?
Speaker 4: I was right? At what point?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 5: I remember that it was a good man that you
were wrong and I was right. Well, we could when
you can do that, we can have a conversation. But
she's she's just plain wrong. It was always there. It
was there in the puss, but you couldn't do it
on the old orthodoxy because they you know, the theory
of the autopsy after.
Speaker 3: Yes, yes, yes, this is goo ahead, go ahead, go ahead,
this is.
Speaker 4: The theory of the autopsy. Was there are these bear years?
Speaker 5: Hispanics should like us, but we're banned on immigration, so
remove the barrier they're going to vote for us. No,
they understood what that Republican party was about, which was
for capital and wealth over labor and work, and they said, no,
we don't want that. And I had polled data to
prove that. And what Donald Trump says, actually there's no
artificial distinction between capital and what.
Speaker 2: I guess what.
Speaker 4: That's the brillancoln McKinley error.
Speaker 5: Republicans the only time Republicans have ever been a majority
party in this country, you know, And so it's like
it was always there. All you had to do was
remove the blinders that orthodoxy and self interest placed in
your way, and Donald having been unpolitical, never had the
blinders on.
Speaker 1: Well, the twenty twelve aftermath just proves you should never
leave an autopsy to morticians. That's really how that happened,
I think, right, let me ask you.
Speaker 4: I'd like to say the autopsy was dead on arrival.
Speaker 1: A couple of questions about the exit polling. You know,
I saw the early exit polls come out, and also
one particular novel I think U used of them. But
when the first exit polls came out and it said
the leading issue was democracy, and I thought, remind me
how exit polls work. I tried to look up the
panel questions and couldn't find it quickly on the internet.
But they give you a pretty selected seven or eight
issues I think could choose from, so nobody is I
don't think very many people are offering that as a
spontaneous what's the most important issue to do is threats
to democracy? The economy makes sense. Well, the one I'm
wondering about is I don't believe Well, you know, they
used to ask about the environment, and they quit doing
it more than twenty years ago because most voters are
not checking it off. It was like two percent, so
the environment was most important to them. But I'm wondering, Henry,
to what extent you think that some of these transgender
and identity politics issues played a large role that I
think we're not asked about in the exit polls.
Speaker 5: Well, you know, it's there's a lot of things that
may not be the most important thing that are the
straw that breaks the cameras back, and that is one
of them, you know, is that Americans, amazingly enough, particularly
Americans in the middle, have nuanced views and that if
what you want to say is should people be allowed
to become transgender. The answer is probably yes. Should children
be allowed to transition?
Speaker 4: No?
Speaker 5: Should people pretend that male and female doesn't exist except
as an intellectual construct?
Speaker 4: You know? And it's like no.
Speaker 5: And so it was one of those things that they
switched because it hit on a weakness that they had
that they could not respond to. That particularly, I would
guess among the last minute deciders who are not necessarily
staunch Republicans helped give them a reason to say no.
And the reason, you know, Trump wins not just because
of the partisan shift that was a huge reason, but
because eight percent of the people didn't like both of them,
and he wins by thirty points. In other words, when
forced to choose between the man you didn't like and
the woman you didn't like, they overwhelming chows the man.
Speaker 4: And I'm sure that's one.
Speaker 5: Of the issues, which was this is crazy this yeah,
and so yeah, people want to be completely tolerant of
Caitlyn Jenner. People don't think that Kindergartener. I wrote a
piece in the Washington Post.
Speaker 1: Best General was for Trump, by the way, Oh yes, no.
Speaker 5: She's always been a Republican. She ran for governor of
California as a Republican. But is that Look, you can
say that Caitlyn Jenner should be treated as Caitlyn Jenner,
not as Bruce. You know, those of us old enough
to remember when Bruce was the Cathlin champion in the
nineteen seventy six Olympus well also believing that kindergartener shouldn't
be introduced to gender ideology. And I wrote an article
attacking California for introducing curriculum doing that in twenty nineteen
and the and I was literally attacked for being a fascist.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Right, So that's the craziness that the moderate that the
middle rejects. If you then turned around and said, as
some people on our extreme right would like to say,
and we should attack Caitlyn Jenner too, we would drive
the people in the middle away. And what Donald Trump
was able to do to say, look, I occupy in
the middle. I think Katelyn Jenner is great, and I
think it's absolutely crazy that sixteen year olds who go
through crises all the time should be allowed to say
I think that I should change my gender and undergo
life changing mutilation surgery.
Speaker 2: That's one of the things that the lens is going
to have difficult with in the coming years. They can't
concede the points that the kids shouldn't have the education,
or the sixteen year old should not be have the breathroots.
They can't concede those things because to do so to
them is to repudiate the entirety of their theory, the
whole notions of queer theory, and all the new ways
of thinking about gender. They would have to be.
Speaker 1: They would have.
Speaker 2: To deny it three times before the and they can't
do that. With global warming and climate change and the
rest of they can't concede. And that's good for the
right because it just shows their inability to conceal what
their eventual ends are.
Speaker 5: Going back, let's go back to nineteen nineteen. Okay, nineteen nineteen,
the global left had a choice that had never been
faced with before, which was to say, the success of
the communist revolution led many to say, we should be
like them. Let's have armed revolution, let's establish the dictator
of ship of the proletariat. That's what Marx wants us
to do. The vast majority of the global left said, no,
we actually kind of like some things about bourgeois democracy.
We're social democrats. And that's when the socialist International broke
up into the Communist International and the Socialist International, and
you started to have communist parties and the Wist and
you had social democratic parties. The left today is faced
not with communism in that sense, but you have a
group of people on left who want to transform Western society.
They hate Western society and it expresses itself in different ways,
and then you have the majority that wants to reform it.
In nineteen nineteen they made a choice and they said
reformers are not transformers.
Speaker 4: And we must be separate.
Speaker 5: Nobody in the West has wanted to do that, and
you can't be credible about saying your reformers until you
reject your transformers. And that bloody battle is what the
Democrats have to go through. And if they can't go
through it, then we will continue to see people, We
will continue to see them. It's like Amy Klobuchar, who
it says, I'm not a socialist. In twenty twenty, they asked, well,
Bernie Sanders a socialists, can you describe how a socialist
is different from a democrat?
Speaker 4: She couldn't do it.
Speaker 5: Yeah she could, but she was afraid to do it
because the consequences was to split the party.
Speaker 4: Guess what after, it's splitting the party to get to
the center.
Speaker 2: I look forward. I look forward to adding the regender
stripe to the to the flight.
Speaker 1: Well, Henry, you are giving me flashbacks to some old
drunken conversations we had about the Shackman Knights versus the
Lovestone Nights, which I didn't think those brain cells still existed,
but this really happened. To Peter. One last quick question
for you, and then I want to return Peter, because
I'm enjoying you schooling him. It's just delightful to watch.
You did something interesting on election night, and listeners, if
you didn't see Henry's tour the forest for four hours
on election night on Twitter X, you missed something. I
couldn't believe you kept going. I could keep going that long,
but you did. But you did something I'd never seen before,
and I wonder if it's new. The polls were closed
and in thirty seconds you got the first dump of
the exit poles, and the first thing you looked at
was the gender divide, which because of course the exopoles
weren't calling the races up in those states, but you
picked out a clue there and what it was was
maybe I just let you explain it, but was you
know the electorate is fifty two to forty eight women
to men, but Trump's leading men by twelve points, and
Harris's leading women only by eight points. And they did
quick math and your head and needed it out to
an advantage for Trump. Is that something you spotted brand
new this time? Or if I just missed you looking
at that before. By the way, all your predictions were
looks good for Trump here and here's why, and here's
what the margin might be. It was quite amazing, especially
in comparison to the network panels, which were so boring
and uninformed and cliche ridden.
Speaker 5: Well, thank you, Steve. It's I do this all the time.
I don't necessarily tweet about it. The reason I go
to the gender thing always is because it's fifty to fifty.
The thing about exit coles is that the crosscabs must
always add up to the top line. If they don't
release the top line, I can create it, Ah, right,
well math.
Speaker 1: Reverse engineering it. Yes, right, that's what I meant to say.
Speaker 5: My entire career is built on applying seventh grade math
to politics. So take that, Networks. But so I always
do it. I didn't talk about it much in the
past because you know, I'm not doing X and so forth.
But my audience needs an instant analysis. I can go
here's fifty two, here's forty eight. I can quickly do it.
I can quickly create the math, and I can do
it in thirty seconds and it'll be accurate. Yeah, And
so that's why I did it, not because of anything
about the election, because I don't think I've tweeted about
in the past. But I have done it when I
needed a very quick what's the top line in a
close election, and this time it really produced real results.
And and what you will go back and see is
what happens is the exit polls are taken, but then
they're always adjusted.
Speaker 4: To reflect the results.
Speaker 5: So what you saw on election night is not what
you will find on the CNN board.
Speaker 4: Now.
Speaker 5: I always hope that somebody took a screenshot so that
you can compare it. I'm so technophobic that I are
non technological events.
Speaker 4: I don't know how to take a screen shot. I
would have done.
Speaker 5: But if you go on now, you know the exit
polls on election I said Harris would win by six
tenths of a point. You know, I predicted Harris would
win by one point three, but I said, if it
and that was but that was assuming a partisan even split.
I said, if it was R plus two or more,
Trump would win, the elect would win the popular vote.
And it's R plus four and Trump is easily going
to win the popular vote. So I was directionally right,
and I just didn't want to be so far out
on a limb that I was like hanging on by
my thiss. It was like, it's not a shred of
credibility with people who aren't true believers, you know.
Speaker 4: So that's what I was trying to do.
Speaker 5: And now you go through and I'm sure you will
find different numbers that will, of course show Trump winning
by three, because that's what he's going to do, win
by between two and three.
Speaker 3: Okay, Henry, it turns out election night isn't over. I
have before me the website of the New York Times.
Why hasn't anybody excuse me, I shouldn't say anybody. Why
haven't Arizona and Nevada been called yet?
Speaker 5: Well, other people have called aras out in Nevad. It's
because Arizona still has a million ballots out. It's estimated
that Nevada may have as many as one hundred thousand
ballots out and that's because they are the peculiarities of
their laws.
Speaker 3: That yeah for But Trump's going to win them both, yeah,
think yes, yeah, Okay.
Speaker 5: There's no conceivable way that the margins he has gets
overturned with what we know about the nature of the
ballots that have yet to be counted. Why the New
York Times and New York Times just follows AP. They
don't make independence. Oh so blame the Associated Press for
the calls on the New York Times website. And I
had an argument with the AP guy in twenty eighteen.
I called the race early and I was wrong. It's
one of the very few times, and it's because I
didn't account for late mail ballots. And basically the guy
snarked me and said, that's why we don't call them early. Okay,
well I've learned, and you should still be calling them earlier.
Oh mighty AP. But I understand why they want to
be very cautious. You know, somebody from the AP may
listen to this. I understand. I'm just a guy. I
don't mind being wrong. You've got a whole reputation. You've
got a whole business. Don't risk destroying your business. And
that's what they're doing, is being ultra cautious. But Trump
has Senate.
Speaker 3: Senate Republicans now, according to the New York Times, have
flipped three seats and have fifty two. You would add
Bob Casey. The New York Times is not dated, McCormick.
I'm sorry, excuse me, McCormick. You would add the loss
of Casey. I'm sorry, Okay, So Pennsylvania Republican, although the
Times slash ap hasn't called that yet. That gets Republicans
to fifty three. What's happening in Arizona, Nevada?
Speaker 4: In the Senate racis so Nevada.
Speaker 5: What happened is, you know, late ballots from Clark County
gave Jackie Rose in the lead. And what we'll see
is how many ballots are left out. We know there's
some Republican rural counties that will carve away at Rosen's lead.
And we know there's some ballots left in Swingy Washoe County,
which is Reno and inclined village on the north shore
of Lake Tahoe. It's narrow enough that I don't think
we should call that Rice. I never did call it.
I have not called it. I will not call it yet.
That could go either way. We'll have to see Arizona.
It's possible Carrie Lake could come from behind. She is
running behind Donald Trump by three to four points on average,
which means that if Trump wins the remaining ballots out
by fifty three forty seven, she will not win because
she will get that she will get forty nine or
fifty percent. She won't close the gap. If the remaining
ballots favor Trump fifty five fifty seven percent, she should
get fifty two to fifty four percent. And there are
enough ballots out there that winning by eight points would
get her with you know, I haven't done the math.
I'm doing this literally in my head. Would get her
within the range where she could win. But that's what
needs to happen. It could happen. There's a lot of
republic ballots probably still out there, not likely, but within
the realm of possibility.
Speaker 3: All right, last question, Now I am under instructions from
my son, who is a student of yours, although he's
actually in medical school. Why is it that the house
is such a getting the results from the House, finding
out who's going to have the majority in the House
is so slow and tortuous by comparison with the Senate
and particularly the presidency. Why do we still not know
who's going to have a majority in the House.
Speaker 4: First of all, because it's very close.
Speaker 5: And secondly, it's mainly because of the male states, mainly
because of California. There are so many state seats in
California that are close. If you go on the New
York Times side, as I did about two hours ago,
and you add up all the seats that Republicans are
leading in, they're leading in or have called two hundred
and twenty three seats, it's possible that some of those flip.
With thirty five or forty percent of the vote left
to be counted, it's possible Republicans can gain a couple,
you know, there's a couple of there's three seats that
the Democrats lead by less than one percent and there's
still votes to be counting. So the thing is that
California is the main reason for this. Washington and Alaska
are also seats that are reasons for because they count
mail ballots. Sleigh, Oregon, there's a Republican cumbent Loria chevezde Riemer,
who's trailing by two points, but they are lake counting
mail ballots there.
Speaker 4: That's the main reason.
Speaker 5: But the fact is, if Republicans had a better night
in the East, if they had clearly won a couple
of these seats, that they're going to look like they're
going to come close to you know, like if they'd
won North Carolina one instead of losing it by one point,
or if they had won Ohio thirteen instead of looks
like they're losing it by two points, and so forth
and so on, and that'd be a point where we
could call the house. But it's because of the combination
of those two factors.
Speaker 3: Okay, I have one last question, and then I read
I hand you over to James and Stephen I promised
to do that. And the last question is this promises
promises the bro theme, the bro theme. The Democrats seem
especially resentful of this that somehow or other Trump engaged
in some kind of sort of batsqueak signals to frat
boys across the country and and men turned out. In fact,
there's a hilarious of some fraternity someplace where there's a
hilarious tweet up a huge number of fraternity boys, all
dressed up in their blue blazers and ties, and one
does a Trumps impression saying, Kamela, You're fired, and the
rest of them burst into cheers.
Speaker 4: Okay, so there's there all the red ties like Trump wears.
Speaker 3: Yes, yes, yes, exactly. You've seen it. You've seen it.
Speaker 4: Okay.
Speaker 3: So was there something real there? Did the campaign intentionally
or is it just Trump? He's a guy's guy and
that just comes across every time you see him.
Speaker 1: On the screen.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 5: So what I would say is a couple of things.
First of all, it is amazing that a group that
engages regularly in identity politics was resentful when somebody plays
identity politics back at them, you know, which is what
was the theme of the theme of the Harris campaign.
Women act as women. Don't tell your husbands, women tell
your dates on Tinder that you won't sleep with them
if they vote for Trump.
Speaker 4: Blah blah blah blah blah.
Speaker 5: You think that maybe if somebody says I want to
be a man, be a man and vote for Trump,
how is one legitimate and not the other. And it's
kind of like Newtonian politics. You wanted an action, but
you didn't want a reaction. What planet do you live in? Well,
you live in a bubble. Your bubble. So that's point one.
Point two is never think of the brow in the
way you usually think of the bros. Let me quickly
to ask you, Peter, I know you, so who is
a bro? When you when you say the word broke,
immediately give me the description of.
Speaker 3: Who is the bro? The bro the bro is Two
images come to mind immediately. One we just discussed and
little fraternity brothers. Those are bros.
Speaker 5: Uh.
Speaker 3: The other bro who comes to mind? He's wearing a
high lak. What do they look They look Uh, they
look like jocks. They have they have square shoulders. They're athletes.
There b students and athletes, and they like to have
a good time. They enjoy a beer. They're patriotic, they
watch they watch a lot of football.
Speaker 4: Those are bros, right, and I'll bet they're white.
Speaker 3: Oh well, okay, I hadn't thought of it that way.
Speaker 4: But that's my point. I didn't think of it that way.
Speaker 5: Everything that they are talking about is assuming literally assuming
that they're communicating to white less educated or white hyper
athletic man.
Speaker 4: What about Latino men?
Speaker 5: Yeah, no, see, I love listening to Joe Rogan. Maybe
what about black man? What about Asian man? Yeah, the
thing is that it's like, this is a corollary of
look at the youth vote. How did you get the
youth vote? Guys, gals, The youth vote is the least
white component of the electorate. If you move Latino men,
you're not moving sixty five year olds, you're moving eighteen
to thirty five year olds. Of course, that demographic move
because it's not your friends, it's not your interns, it's
not those people. It's the people you look down on,
the people you've never been to. It's the people who
are driving your trucks, pumping your gas, who are checking
you out at the supermarket, and living in the Rio
Grand Valley. That's the eighteen to thirty year old demographic.
Speaker 2: And they also have things that binding them together, cultural
things from games to culture to movies to the rest
of it. There are a whole series of tropes that
would never enter the consciousness of the A is a
shared culture amongst them. The transcends race, which is a
good thing and a very American thing.
Speaker 4: That's exactly that's exactly right. And they can't see any
of that.
Speaker 2: And it'll realize that if you really screw up a
Star Wars series with a particularly overdone, heavy handed message,
you've alienated a lot of people across, not just the
white nerds in the basement. I mean, you can go
back and count a shift to Trump by the number
of people who were in who were infuriated that Warhammer
lore had now been readjusted to be more diverse to women.
I mean, these little cultural earthquakes out there that reverberate
in ways that they never see coming because they they
write them off. All they see is that when they
hear that the bros Are moving to Trump, they think
that they've all set up their ironing boards and they're
putting the crease in their SS uniform so they can
go out and do fascists. No, they just don't want
to be nanny dead and fingerwag waved dead by a
bunch of hectoring women who came from HR to make
their life miserable.
Speaker 4: Anyway.
Speaker 5: The third thing I want to say is, you know,
from a monkey python perspective, there's a skit called the
Norwegian fish Lapping Dance where John Pleice is standing on
a pier and Michael Palin is standing on a pier
into this kind of wimpy music. Michael Palin dances up
and he takes two sardines and slaps John Police on
the cheek.
Speaker 4: Okay, this is.
Speaker 5: The equivalent of what Michelle Obama was doing. And then
at the end of the Norwegian fish Lamp we dance.
John Pleice takes out a huge salmon and knocks Michael
Palin into the ocean and that ecua.
Speaker 2: Actually, I have to say that I believe it was
a river, not an ocean. And on that note, off
fortunate incorrectness when it comes to a classic Munti python skin.
I believe we have to let Henry go ever a pleasure,
and again I think we managed to drag some stuff
out of you. We know you're reticent sometimes to give
your views on things, but listen, folks, more to come.
You can find more of Henry at the Beyond the
Polls podcast and of course the book Working Class Republican,
Donald Reagan and the Return of Blue Collar Conservatism. Fascinating stuff.
It's been a joy and I've learned a lot. So
thanks for joining us, and we'll see you on your podcast.
Speaker 4: At the Rigishine network, Thank you very much.
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Peter has to Peter has to go. Peter is gone, well,
all of a sudden, It's kind of kind of lonely
to here. Henry's gone, and Peter right away, and Steven
as well.
Speaker 1: I'm still around, but you know, just of the show.
Speaker 2: Well, if ladies and gentlemen doing his bit to step
into these shoes of rob, let me spoil what you
happen to be doing that I can't see. Yes, Stephen
is still here. Okay, all right, so you are here.
We'll just keep rolling with this. Then I have nothing
more to add everything. I would be superfluous. I mean,
Henry just sort of says it all. But I have
the feeling, Stephen, that you might have something you wanted
to add, some little bon moo, some prediction, some thought
to come. What would you like to leave the listeners with.
Speaker 1: Well, it's a big subject that we can't get into,
but I think Joe Rogan is the Qualt, the Walter
Cronkite of our age in terms of audience and trusts.
And I think that's a big takeaway of the selection cycle. Perhaps.
Speaker 2: Okay, well, I look forward to two years from now
from Joe Rogan saying that he believes the war in
Taiwan has been lost. Never know how these things are
going to go. That's interesting. I mean Cronkite never put
himself out there.
Speaker 4: In the way that I mean.
Speaker 2: Rogan is an interlocutor, he's a he's he's a he's
a prodter, he's a poker, he's a I mean, he
takes time. I mean, he's he's not one of those
guys you can go right for the juggulter and try
to get the great quote and the rest of it.
I mean, Cronkeyed had the pretense of telling you the
way it was right.
Speaker 4: He was the he was the.
Speaker 2: The Robert McNamara technocratic IBM controlled all all those nineteen
sixties things. He was that until he wasn't and people realized,
perhaps that they had been shading behind it all all
the way. And I mean, I would thought that he
would have said that Joe Rogan was going to be
the Rush Limbaugh inasmuch as he was long form and
influential in ways that changed people's minds. But the Kronkite hmm,
is even a Cronkeyed analogy valid in this world of
completely fractured media.
Speaker 1: Well, I mean the only reason I say that is
because he's commanding this enormous audience, and I think people
trust him because he hey Look, he's the opposite of
Rush Limbaugh. He doesn't put his own opinions out there
very forcefully. He doesn't make him self the center of attention.
He lets people talk and explain themselves. And if it's correct,
then he got undred million views for his Trump interview.
Well that's I don't know, the networks in a week
don't get that many viewers anymore. And so that makes
him the dominant media figure of our time. And I'm
going to say this is the first podcast election. Twenty
twelve was the first big data election. This was the
podcast election.
Speaker 2: And Harris I think was wise not to go on
Rogan because I think she would have revealed herself effort
but twenty forty minutes or so to be an absolute
intellectual nullody who's been born aloft by political philanthropy for
her entire career. So yeah, that was a smart thing
to do. But people also noticed that she wasn't doing
it and didn't buy any of the reasons that she
said that she wasn't. I mean, they thought, no, she's
not doing it because she's not good at that sort
of thing. Vance was good at it. I saw a
whole bunch of and again this is what fascinated to me.
At the beginning, we were told by Tim Waltz that.
Speaker 1: Jade Vance was weird.
Speaker 2: There's something weird about him, and the weird thing that
they're trying to say was because he had somewhat fairly
traditional ideas about societal organization when the game to men
and women, brocreation, marriage, and the rest of it, which
most people do not regard as weird. But walt ended
up looking weirder and weirder and weirder to people the
more the thing got on and what you got out
of Jdvans is sitting back there, very calmly explaining why
we need to stockpile capacitors and transformers in the case
of a, yeah, an Iranian electromagnetic pulse that destroy society.
I'm going to go with a nerdy guy who's kind
of thought about those things a few times before. I
am about the fellow who's going to make couch jokes
and applaud the various Well, I'm about to say something
about the state of Minnesota that I dassn't because I
like it. That's another podcast. It's not going to be
the Diner. The Diner will be coming to you this weekend.
By the way, that's me James Lylacs at the Diner.
A strenuously non political enterprise. It just seeks to sort
of roam about the back rooms of American culture and
open up the drawers and rifle through them and never
ever know what it's going to be. We just sort
of show up, we talk, and after thirty minut we
shut up and drive home. So you're welcome to come
to the Diner. You are, of course welcome to come
to ricochet dot com. Join up. It's cheap. Come on,
you're going to want to have a conversation in the
next few years about all that goes right and all
that goes wrong. There's so much to say in what
Henry was talking about, and if you would like to
do so, well, that's the great thing about Ricochet. You
have to be a member and pee just a little
bit to contribute and make posts, and that means that
the post quality signal of the noise ratio is fantastic.
Stephen it's been a pleasure. We'll see everybody in the
comments at Ricochet four point oh, and I'm out of here.
We'll see you next week.
Speaker 3: Next week, everybody, Ricochet, Ye join the conversation