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