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Nov. 5, 2024 - System Update - Glenn Greenwald
01:50:32
Election Eve Special With Michael Tracey, Briahna Joy Gray & Zaid Jilani

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Good evening.
It is Monday, November 4th.
Welcome to another brand spanking edition of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every weeknight at 7 p.m.
Eastern here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
I'm Michael Tracy, filling in once again for the enigmatic Glenn Greenwald, who is off doing something or other tonight.
But we're going to have a jam-packed show for you because, as you might be aware, tonight is the eve of the 2024 presidential election.
And therefore, there is much to discuss.
I'm here in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Lancaster County, where the poor citizens of Pennsylvania have been absolutely inundated with campaign propaganda for an interminable period of time at this point, and hopefully will soon receive some relief.
But anyway, as a reminder, make sure that you download the Rumble app.
That is available on your smartphone and your smart television and your smart many other devices that spy on you.
But as a trade-off, you can acquire the Rumble app.
And on top of that, also be aware that you can obtain the system update programming after the show, 12 hours after, on your favorite podcast platforms such as Apple and Spotify.
And finally, if you appreciate our journalism and other such stuff that we do here on the System Update, another thing you can do is sign up for Locals.
That's at greenwall.locals.com, if I'm recalling the URL correctly, where transcripts get published and other forms of written journalism and then an exclusive twice-weekly aftershow of sorts.
But for now, welcome to a new episode of System Update starting right now.
Okay, so like I mentioned, I'm here in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
Pennsylvania, as everybody is tediously aware, is ground zero for the 2024 campaign.
The amount of propaganda that everybody is being bombarded with in this state is astounding.
It's probably similar in previous years, but now it just seems like it's reaching a new level.
Like, you literally cannot turn on the television without seeing like five consecutive ads.
From politicians that are criticizing the other politicians.
It's just suffusing the entire commonwealth and people might kind of just not be inhabiting the same world if you live in, I don't know, Vermont or Arkansas or Kentucky or Massachusetts or some other place that's not seen as hotly contested in this election.
You just inhabit a different world and it really is bizarre.
Obviously to do with the structure of the U.S. electoral system, where we allocate electors by popular vote in individual states, and then whoever gets a majority in the Electoral College wins, and therefore people pour into the states that seem to be the most critical to winning the Electoral College, and here we are in Pennsylvania.
I've been across the country covering the elections.
I've been in Nevada, I've been in Arizona, I've been in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and now here I am concluding the spirited and wonderful 2024 campaign season here in Pennsylvania.
And tonight I capped things off by just having gone to one of Donald J. Trump, you might have heard of him, one of Donald J. Trump's final rallies.
Now, he could always, who knows, hold additional rallies if he wins or even if he loses.
It's difficult to say, but at least as of this campaign cycle, one of his final rallies was this afternoon in Redding, Pennsylvania.
Spelled deceptively as Reading, but all the locals know that it's pronounced Redding, so make sure you have that down pat if you ever want to Become a political prognosticator and discuss this particular micro section of Pennsylvania, the Commonwealth.
And there was an interesting occurrence at this Trump campaign rally that I was there to witness myself, where he gave a curious shout out to a particular political ally of his.
And so let's play that clip of Donald Trump today at the rally in Redding, Pennsylvania, if we could.
So normally you see all these jobs, everything, hundreds of thousands of jobs just because of the size.
And they just announced, Mike, you'd be amazed at this.
Mike, look at our Mike.
Look at him.
He lost all that weight.
He looks so handsome.
Stand up, Mike Pompeo.
Stand up, Mike.
He looks so handsome.
Wow.
Man, I'm going to ask him, how the hell did he do that?
That's good.
Good.
That's great.
Okay, so I was sitting actually behind Pompeo, further up in the arena-style seating, and I saw him stand up.
He waved to the crowd.
Trump had prompted the crowd to give Mike Pompeo a nice round of applause.
One of the few people that Trump actually singled out for praise in this particular event And we've heard a lot.
One of the big Trump campaign themes is supposedly that he has this Avengers-style dream team of new people who are going to come in to a second Trump administration and combat the deep state or bring peace and prosperity and justice to America.
I've always found this a bit odd because although people like Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
and Tulsi Gabbard and others promote this kind of fairy tale, Mike Pompeo has always been one of the foremost people in the Trump coalition, the Trump governing coalition.
He was one of the few senior level administration officials In the first Trump administration, with whom Trump never had a personal falling out.
Trump first appointed Pompeo as CIA Director and then elevated him to Secretary of State, In which capacity Pompeo served for the majority of the Trump presidency and carried out dutifully their joint policy initiatives.
And one of those policy initiatives was to basically declare jihad against WikiLeaks Which, when Pompeo was CIA director, he called a hostile non-state intelligence service and then directed the resources of the executive branch to combating and ultimately prosecuting in the form of Julian Assange,
Assange, who of course was indicted in 2019 and then again with a superseding indictment in 2020, he was extracted from the Ecuadorian embassy in London, thrown into Belmarsh prison.
And only a few months ago was he finally released when under the Biden Department of Justice, Assange and his counsel arranged for a plea agreement that enabled him to leave prison and go back to Australia.
So people kind of try to assert that there's some fundamental disparity or incongruence between Trump and Pompeo.
And yet, Trump has been going around praising Pompeo.
He told the radio host Hugh Hewitt, Recently, that Pompeo is among the people that are in consideration by Trump for another senior-level role in his forthcoming administration, which would make perfect sense because him and Pompeo were in total harmony, as far as anybody could tell, while Trump was in power the first time.
Trump even went on Joe Rogan and favorably name-dropped Pompeo.
And then now here Pompeo is...
going around in the Trump entourage, campaigning with him and getting called out by Trump as one of his favored backers.
So, I mean, people can have this hallucinatory view of like what Trump might do because they bought into this whole RFK Jr. mythology, where because like RFK Jr. might have some ancillary role at the Food and Drug Administration with like removing toxin from the oil supply, from the soil supply, where because like RFK Jr. might have some ancillary role at the Food and Drug Administration with like removing toxin from the oil supply, from the soil supply, that therefore
Trump himself is telling you who is within his sphere of influence, who is within his orbit.
It's Mike Pompeo.
And if you're a person who styles yourself or views yourself to be an enormous defender of WikiLeaks, as I've always been since, I don't know, 2009, 10, when they first became prominent in American domestic politics and international affairs as well,
then it's just, it's a massive I think it's a big bit of cognitive dissonance to then also be cheerleading for Donald Trump when he's telling you blatantly that Mike Pompeo is still in his good graces.
Mike Pompeo also spoke at the Republican convention.
I mean, this is not hidden.
It's coming out of Donald Trump's own mouth.
Employ some kind of circuitous reasoning and then still claim that it's of urgent moral necessity to reinstate Republican executive power.
Okay, that's your prerogative, but at least go into it with some clarity as to what you're doing.
You know, I didn't vote for either Kamala Harris or Donald Trump.
Not that anybody should particularly care about my own voting behavior, but I do think it's worthwhile to Be at least transparent about what I've done.
I've never bought into this whole taboo that certain journalists have where you're supposed to steadfastly conceal your own private political activity or voting behavior.
That never made sense to me.
And I wrote out a whole explanation of why I did this.
This was at mtracy.net.
People can go look it up if they'd like.
Published over the weekend.
We have, hopefully, a screen grab here.
But one thing that I am trying to do is call attention to the legions, the tens of millions of non-voters who are constantly berated and hectored and lectured and scolded for not voting for one of the two major party candidates.
Either they're voting third party or not voting at all, which I think is a perfectly valid position.
For people who are abstaining from the electoral process because they don't wish to concede that it has any legitimacy in their eyes.
And there are so many voters across Pennsylvania.
Before I get onto this, I do want to ask the producers to throw up the photo of the woman at the Trump rally who was sitting behind me.
She was a Spanish-speaking woman.
And before I get onto my larger point, I just do want to point out that if you go and sit at one of these Trump rallies, I mean, Redding, Pennsylvania is heavily Latino, and there were lots of people who were cheering When Marco Rubio,
supposedly one of the former neocons, quote unquote, who has been banished from the Republican Party under Trump, but is still also within the Trump sphere of influence, just like Tom Cotton, who is also sitting in the VIP section at this rally today.
But, you know, I say too much in this regard, I guess, for some people.
But I do want to point out just like the very clear diversity of In the demographics that are supporting Trump this time around.
I mean, I think it's very much probable, probably almost even certain that Trump will receive a heavily diversified vote racially, ethnically, and religiously tomorrow, probably superseding or exceeding the racial diversity of his vote in 2020 and 2016.
And if anything, he might be going down with white voters overall, mostly heavily educated, highly educated white voters.
If Trump does lose, it'll probably look something like college-educated white voters trending against him just as happened between 2016 and 2020.
And it's not offset sufficiently by the increased level of Support from racial minorities that he receives, including that woman who happened to be behind me at the rally.
And there were lots of other, you know, diverse people at this rally.
So, I mean, it cuts right against this fanciful idea that Trump is leading some sort of, quote, Nazi movement.
I mean, it doesn't seem to include all that much of an appeal to, like, racial purification zealotry if you're including within the current iteration of the Maka movement a very visibly diverse set of people.
Anyway, the non-voter or the undecided voter I think is very interesting.
So I also wrote today an article for Newsweek where I went and surveyed lots of undecided voters in Pennsylvania.
And people I think have a misconception about what the prototypical undecided voter is this late in the election cycle.
It's really not a voter that is determined to vote and is still trying to make his or her mind up between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump.
Those voters do exist.
I mean, you would never know it if you look at internet comment sections all day.
But that voter does exist, but more often what you encounter are people who are undecided voters in the sense that they don't know whether it's even worth their time to go vote at all.
They tend to have A disenchanted idea of the electoral process as a whole, skeptical toward the two major candidates, but they might be more favorable toward one or the other, but the decision point that they've yet to complete in their thought process is whether to even vote at all.
And interestingly, a number of these people, if they were prodded, if they were Maybe targeted by a competent Republican get out the vote operation, which we're told Elon Musk is funding in Pennsylvania.
Remains to be seen whether that's going to be effective.
But I encountered more often than not among this like basket of voters who are undecided about whether to vote almost more often than not.
And again, I grant this is anecdotal, but like what else can I do in terms of conducting reportage than to compile anecdotes?
More often than not, these people who are undecided about whether to vote, they have a preference for Trump.
Right.
So they could be amenable to motivational interventions on the part of like some Republican apparatus to try to get them out to vote, encourage them to be motivated enough to go act on their preference.
But so far they haven't been reached in that way, at least from what I have been able to gather, in my sample size.
I've talked to, I don't know, 25 people, and there are a lot of people who reflect this kind of profile.
And yesterday, I was out across different parts of most like Philadelphia suburbs with Megan O'Rourke, who's a producer here on the System Update show.
We were just kind of doing Man on the Tree interviews.
Sometimes people can kind of maybe snicker at the utility of conducting Man on the Tree interviews, but they're really pretty...
Informative, I find.
Because you're kind of just doing a random sample of voters and I particularly wanted to see if we could identify non-voters, right?
People who are Abstaining from the election, whether out of pure apathy or whether out of distaste for the two candidates or for any other reason, because I think that that segment of voters are under-analyzed.
But first, I want to show you a clip of an interview that we did with a person who really reflects why I think more people should do man on the street to have interviews, because you're bound to encounter A voter or a would-be voter who just defies any stereotypical expectation you might have.
So let's go to the interview that we did with the young woman who was a Walmart worker.
So what do you think about the election coming up?
Um, I think this election is very important this time.
It's a lot going on, so we need a good president, you know.
And I think Trump will be a good president, in my opinion, because he's actually done stuff in the office.
I haven't really seen the vice president, like, really do anything, even though being vice president...
Yeah, so I just feel like a guy being a president is better, in my opinion.
Really?
Yes.
Explain.
I feel like, what's her name?
Kamala.
Kamala was president.
I feel like we would be in war with other countries because she was like, I don't know, females are very sensitive.
Wow.
What do you like that Trump did when he was in office the first time?
I can't remember.
I know he did something, some stuff People say they don't like Trump but they have to understand he did do stuff while he was in office And what do you think about Kamala?
Other than that, she's a woman Do you think she's done a good job campaigning or no?
Okay, so I just wanted to play that not because it's necessarily totally representative of anything in particular just because you encounter all these amazing anecdotal stories about how people formulate
And as somebody who covers politics for better or worse day in and day out, you can kind of get into certain patterns or rhythms in terms of how you kind of just assume that the electorate is shaping up.
And of course, we came across a Walmart worker.
She was actually 17, OK?
But she was working at Walmart.
She's not eligible to vote this year.
But she says her family is all voting for Trump.
She wants Trump to win.
She has some striking views as to whether a woman should be in office.
And she's a young black woman who's a low wage worker at Walmart and supporting Trump.
So I just throw that out there to say that there are so many manifestations of the voter that I think you only really encounter if you go out into the wild and just kind of Talk to a random selection of people.
Get off the internet.
Not that the internet is totally useless, but in terms of encountering people who are kind of outside, who defy your expectations as to how people arrive at their political preferences, it's useful to go out and talk to people.
So let's also play...
I mean, I had the bright idea of going to Walmart because I think that's sort of a...
You know, an instructive place to kind of talk to people who may be undecided or less engaged in the political process.
Yeah, so let's play that other interview that I did with the second woman at Walmart with her son.
So you said you haven't really been following the election much at all.
What do you know to the extent that you know anything?
I know that there is Kamala Harris and I know Donald Trump.
And I know the perfect pick.
And he knows who he would pick.
Who would you pick?
Kamala Harris.
Why is that?
I don't trust Trump.
I just don't trust Trump.
I never trusted him.
What don't you like about Trump in particular?
Was there anything he did when he was president the first time that you didn't like?
No, because I don't think I noticed anything yet.
You were young.
You were just young.
How old are you?
Nine.
Okay, so you were just...
Okay, so right at the end of Obama, and then Trump came in.
And what do you like about Kamala, if anything?
I don't know.
I just don't know.
You just like her as an alternative to Trump?
Yes.
And you just haven't been following it?
I just haven't really been following.
I didn't have any problems when Trump was in.
I thought he was fine before.
But I don't really know who's doing what this year.
Like who's, you know, what everybody's talking about.
I just really don't keep up.
Have you voted in the past?
I have not ever.
Never?
Never in my life.
And why?
You just don't think that there's enough at stake for you to...
It's not that.
It's just, I just never have.
I really never have.
But if I had to pick one, I would go back with Trump.
Really?
Just because he did fine before.
Like, I just think I would choose him.
That's it.
And what do you think of Kamala Harris?
Okay, so I play that because she's obviously an infrequent voter.
She has never voted, but she's saying that she has a preference for Trump.
So this is like the prototypical...
The modal voter that the get-out-the-vote operations that are run by both parties would want to identify and then try to urge or motivate to vote.
And it doesn't seem like that's happened with her.
And I can give you a bunch of other examples of people who fit a similar profile.
And so I, you know, one of my tentative theories here is that There's a fairly sizable, untapped pool of voters who could lean Republican, who Yeah, and I'm sorry.
I'm getting the voices of other people in my head right now, so I'm losing my train of thought.
My basic theory is that there does appear in Pennsylvania and other states to be a large and untapped or seemingly untapped pool of potential Trump or Republican voters who need a bit of extra motivation Given their skepticism of the system or their low propensity to vote at all who could potentially be Motivated
to vote if they were made contact with by a get-out-the-vote operation.
But the Republicans don't seem – historically have not been as competent at utilizing get-out-the-vote kind of methods as Democrats.
And so if Trump does lose Pennsylvania, which I think – Everybody tells me to toss it up, so let's just go with that.
But let's say if he does lose, I think a large share of the reason will be that voters such as this have not...
I've been contacted or persuaded or engaged with by these well-funded, billionaire-funded groups who were told are flooding the state with ads, but apparently don't have the wherewithal to identify this type of voter, again, who says that she would prefer Trump, but is just not interested enough in the election to bother.
So anyway, now we're going to switch gears here and go and talk to Brianna Joy Gray.
And I think I'm going to now read an ad.
Is that correct?
Okay.
I will read the ad.
Bear with me, Brianna.
We're maybe working through some slight technical difficulties here, but Brianna...
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Okay, so now we're with Brianna Joy Gray.
I hope you found that amusing.
And I always love to surprise myself with these dad reads.
Let me tell you, I'm a big advocate of a high-protein, no-seed-oil lifestyle.
I'm not even trying to be funny.
Like, I'm all about that.
Now, whey protein and my complexion don't play well together, but I've got to say, generally speaking...
I'm a big fan of a natural dairy or non-dairy supplement to one's coffee in the morning with salt and seed oil, so big thumbs up from you over here.
Okay, I'm just going to decline to even engage in that whole discussion, I guess, because I'm too gobsmacked by having read that ad.
Okay, so Brianna, I've wanted to talk to you for a while because...
Obviously, we're on, as you may be aware, the eve of the 2024 election.
There could be some people out there who are still making up their minds.
I would doubt that there are that many watching System Update on Rumble who are undecided, but you never know.
One thing that I've noted, having gone around and surveyed undecided voters here in Pennsylvania, which is ground zero for an endless bombardment of propaganda, it's actually incredible.
I mean, I know this happens every election cycle to some extent, especially Post Citizens United, which basically eliminated all constraints on political spending.
But it really is incredible to see just how inundated Pennsylvanians are.
I've talked to a lot of Pennsylvania voters Who are undecided partially because they're so alienated from all the endless propaganda that they're being bombarded with that they kind of just are contemplating potentially not even voting out of spite and I sympathize with that.
Did you get a chance to look at any of the articles that I sent you on this kind of...
I'm trying to basically postulate a certain type of undecided voter who exists out there in the universe who I think is underexamined.
And it's not somebody who's making this last-minute impulsive decision between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris.
Most people who are determined to vote already would make up their minds.
Those aren't the quintessential undecided voter.
The undecided voter that I most encounter, Here in Pennsylvania and also around the country are people who are disenchanted with the electoral process and they may have a mild preference, one or the other.
Interestingly enough, they tend to express more of a preference for Trump in my experience, but they might not be motivated to actually go and bother.
And folks, they don't think it particularly matters.
Yeah, that doesn't surprise me at all.
I mean, we do this every election cycle, right?
What is the stat about there being more non-voters than Americans who identify with either political party, record high numbers of people who identify as independents, right?
And that is largely because people, once you get to a certain age, it only takes a few election cycles to start to get the sense that no matter who's sitting in the Oval Office, your life is substantively the same.
Now, I'm not going to sit here and say that there aren't meaningful differences that come around on a generational basis, that there are meaningful differences in terms of the labor conditions that people have to organize under or, let's say, Roe being overturned.
But realistically speaking, practically speaking, for most people's lives, the consequences of organizing under Biden's Labor Department being better, it is meaningful at the same time, fewer than 10% of Americans are in unions, and those it is meaningful at the same time, fewer than 10% of Americans are in unions, and those numbers have not meaningfully dropped, despite the fact that we
And again, that is not to say to diminish those gains, but the fact is when you have wins that directly touch the lives of so few Americans, you find yourself...
Facing a lot of disaffected voters.
Now, there are policies that have the potential to touch a lot of people in one fell swoop.
Remember, Biden's announced student debt policy was going to affect 44 million Americans.
44 million Americans who are going to get 10 to $20,000 of their student debt canceled.
Remember that.
Remember how impactful the $1,200 checks were back in the early days of COVID. There are voters today still, I'm sure you encountered some of them, who will evoke those checks as long ago as they were as some of the most meaningful interventions from the government they've ever experienced in their life.
And yet Democrats have a tendency to...
I would argue purposefully avoid, but even if you're giving them the benefit of the doubt, set up their agenda, their policy agendas that strive more for small incrementalism instead of the sweeping programs that I think could really win devoted, committed members of the base.
For many, many cycles going forward.
And then the last point on that, I'd say that's Pennsylvania specific.
It's notable that fracking and Kamala Harris' flip-flopping on a fracking ban has been such a point of contention.
She's seemingly willing to completely revise her 2019-2020 stance.
Why?
Well, there's only about 17,000 fracking jobs in the entire state of Pennsylvania.
In fact, a majority of Pennsylvania voters are supportive of the fracking ban and are deeply concerned about the health implications of having to drink this luminous light on fire water that fracking creates.
On the other hand, had she wanted to touch again tens of thousands of Pennsylvania voters, she could have focused on the fact that Pennsylvania voters are still operating under a federal minimum wage.
That's The federal minimum wage that hasn't been raised since 2009, the longest period in American history since we've had a minimum wage.
Even though there's tens of thousands of minimum wage workers in Pennsylvania that are still on the federal minimum wage rate, you barely hear a peep out of the Democratic Party about a $15 minimum wage, which isn't some far-fetched lefty agenda item.
It's a core base item on the Democratic agenda.
So what is really going on here?
It feels like there's many voters who are increasingly disaffected because the Democratic Party is pitching their pitch to their donor base, who care about things like a fracking ban, the energy company, the defense contractors, and the like, instead of actually talking to the voters whose votes they need.
And look at who Kamala Harris is clearly tailoring her message to.
It's still bizarre to me to even utter this out loud, but it really is centered on Liz Cheney and disaffected, highly engaged, news-attentive Republicans Kamala Harris apparently wagers that she'll be able to convince to come and vote for the Democrat.
I don't know for sure that that is an impossibly crazy strategy.
It certainly didn't work in 2016 for Hillary Clinton when she employed a version of it, but you could argue perhaps that it might have worked to some extent for Biden in 2020.
It's hard to say.
I mean, Biden did largely win in the consistent states because of major shifts within affluent suburbs, whereas the city centers, like in Philadelphia or Detroit, Where Milwaukee actually trended marginally toward Trump, but that was offset by the major gains that the Democrats made in these affluent suburbs, which are increasingly at the forefront of their electoral coalition.
But I did want to...
There's been a ton of energy expended on this show and other shows in the so-called alternative media ecosystem, dismantling the Democrats.
And I'm always all for that, okay?
I can never get enough of it, and I support it on principle.
But I do want to talk about Donald Trump, because one thing that's so maddening to me about this election cycle, and I spelled it out in the other article that I wrote about my non-vote in the 2024 election, is that I consider myself, to some extent, a part of alternative media.
I think it's a necessary corrective and has been a necessary corrective to the propagation of mainstream narratives and opening opportunities for people who might not have a traditional route to conduct journalism or engage in the media.
I'm sorry to say, and people are going to get angry at me for saying this who are watching, but a lot of alternative media this cycle has basically just been converted into a Republican cheerleading squad.
I mean, Donald Trump can handpick whatever podcaster, bro, guy, and I don't even say that derogatorily, I watch some of these podcasts, okay, who he can go and banter with for an hour and a half and they won't ask him a single challenging question.
And the list goes on.
I mean, there are people who, you know, I would have had a much more respectable opinion of like a year or two ago, who decided that their proper role in the 2024 election was basically just to join the Trump bandwagon.
And if you want to vote for Trump, okay, fine, but let's actually do some serious critique of his record, of his policy positions, and it's just been virtually missing...
In these alternative media spheres, as far as I could tell.
And I don't know if you watched any of my introduction, but I happened to be at one of the final Trump rallies today in Redding, Pennsylvania.
He pointed to Mike Pompeo, who was there in the Trump entourage, out on the campaign trail with Trump today, said what a great guy he is.
He said on multiple occasions that Mike Pompeo is one of the people that is in consideration for another senior-level administration position.
And for all we want to bemoan the Democrats Relying on Dick and Liz Cheney, what's the substantive difference, really, between Trump parading around with Mike Pompeo?
Tom Cotton was also there, one of the most virulent hawks in the entire Senate.
Marco Rubio was in the entourage today.
I mean, Lindsey Graham is a top surrogate.
None of these people have been cast out of the so-called RFK Jr.
Reformed MAGA or Republican Party or Maha Party.
And I just think that there's such a torrent of confusion around this.
And a lack of serious critical examination that I sort of sometimes worry that the overwhelming focus that I have often partook in and scrutinizing the Democrats has given way to Trump and the Republicans, at least in these alternative media circles, kind of being given a free pass.
And there's just a flood of propaganda being repeated that is flattering to them without actually examining the record or what they would do a second time.
So am I crazy here?
Yeah, you're not crazy, Michael.
I want to say you've demonstrated an enormous amount of integrity in being willing to be consistent about this and call out both sides.
Now, look, I'm more of a member of the left side of the independent media sphere, so I don't think there's really any as much of a lack of criticism of Trump over there, particularly people who are more center-left leaders.
On this side of what we call the establishment left, on this side of the aisle, spends, I would argue, even too much time criticizing Trump.
But I do think kind of the more independent center or independent right media sphere does sometimes fall prey to a sort of fallacy that many of us fall prey to in politics, which is As a result of us living in a two-party system,
sometimes the criticism of the other, the criticism of the party that is farther away from where your interests lie ends up defaulting into praise for your own side.
And there is a presumption that criticism of one team means that the other team is better and therefore good.
And I think that's part of what's going on here.
I think there are really legitimate critiques to be made about the Democratic Party and Kamala Harris's choice to bear hug every neocon within reach.
You have Twitter campaigns to recruit George W. Bush to endorse Kamala Harris.
I mean, it's really dystopian stuff.
But you're getting a similar kind of blindness, myopia about what's going on on the right in terms of Trump's embrace of neoconservatives.
I mean, you said earlier that in your experience doing these man on the street interviews, you sometimes find these disaffected voters lean right, lean toward Donald Trump.
And that doesn't surprise me at all, in part because I think the instinct for people when they are disaffected is to throw a monkey wrench into the machinery and vote for the least establishment candidate.
Now, you'd be hard pressed to call Donald Trump not an establishment person.
He was literally a president of the United States of America.
And because it's 2024, not 2016, we know what happens when he's president.
We know that he does not, in fact, drain the swamp.
He fills it with the same creatures that have been inhabiting it since time immemorial.
He is not, in fact, an anti-war, pro-peace, isolationist, whatever you want to call it, sort of a candidate.
But he is benefiting from the fact that Kamala Harris is a member of the current administration that is litigating two wars, two wars that didn't exist when Donald Trump was in office.
I think the curative to this, in some ways, is actually growing, establishing, focusing, and highlighting alternative parties, whether it's someone like Chase Oliver, the libertarian candidate, who is, in fact, An anti-war candidate who opposes the interventions in Ukraine and Israel, or someone like Jill Stein, Claudia de la Cruz, or Colonel West on the left side of the aisle who are staunchly anti-war candidates.
At the end of the day, when you don't have a resting place, a landing pad for people's ideologies to come to, it's very, very easy to exploit their political opposition to one camp as fidelity to another.
Yeah, and let me give you an example of something that I've found also maddening.
This kind of typifies some of my frustration with this.
So in the final week, Donald Trump and his campaign operation, I think, have wisely identified that a useful foil for them politically will be Liz Cheney and Dick Cheney, right?
Donald Trump is going to Michigan and having imams appear on stage with him and suggesting that he would be preferable for their interests because he stands opposed to the vicious warmonger that is Liz Cheney.
I don't know why so few people have bothered to do this.
Like, I'm not trying to make myself out to be a martyr, but I really don't know of anybody else who's done it.
Just go back into the record when Trump was actually in power as president the first time.
Liz Cheney was one of his most stalwart defenders.
You know, back when Trump drone strike assassinated Soleimani, first out the gate, the top Iranian general, first out the gate cheering for that was Liz Cheney.
Tulsi Gabbard, who was running for president in the Democratic primaries at the time, was one of the first to denounce that and accuse Trump of betraying any voter who thought they might have been voting for him on anti-war grounds.
And said that, you know, Trump was basically just like the rest of them.
Of course, that's now shifted with no explanation.
Everything just gets flushed down the memory hole because everybody has a memory of a fruit fly.
But I don't know.
I guess I follow the stuff too closely to have my brain zapped in that fashion.
And I like remember stuff that happened a couple of years ago.
And that makes me very unusual.
But here's what exemplifies my frustration.
OK, so Trump elevates Liz Cheney as the foil as a reaction to Kamala Harris elevating Liz Cheney as an ally.
But Donald Trump, and nobody's covered this, has recently taken to saying that he was never going to withdraw from Afghanistan.
OK, one of the few policy fissures that Trump and Liz Cheney did have when he when Trump was president was that Liz Cheney tried to legislatively impede Trump's ability to execute.
A withdrawal from Afghanistan because Trebley's nominally claimed that that was his intent toward the end of his term.
He first escalated in Afghanistan.
People forget this.
He dropped a record number of munitions in Afghanistan in the years 2018 and 2019.
And he also escalated the troop deployments in Afghanistan in 2017 by several thousand.
So again, all flushed down the memory hole.
But then toward the end of his first term, he did claim that he wanted to withdraw.
And Liz Cheney, with the help of Democrats in Congress, as usual, sought to stymie that.
But now, in 2020, and Trump never actually...
Fulfill the withdrawal that he claimed that he wanted to do.
Biden ultimately did.
So then as a partisan or polarized reaction to the Biden withdrawal, what Trump has done is debuted a brand new position in the 2024 campaign, which is that he was never going to withdraw at all.
It was actually all a facade.
The Doha agreement that he...
brokered along with Mike Pompeo with the Taliban in February of 2020, called for the withdrawal of all U.S. troops from all U.S. bases in Afghanistan.
That was the crux of what the withdrawal was supposed to consist of, right?
But Trump says he was actually going to maintain a permanent occupation force in Afghanistan at Bagram Air Base with 4,000 or more troops and all the ancillary combat missions that that would have to entail to retain that base under the violent protest of the Taliban and other local groups, which obviously the reason that the war was raging for 20 years is because the Taliban and the other local indigenous groups wanted to violently which obviously the reason that the war was raging for 20 years is because the
But Trump says he would have kept that in perpetuity now.
And here's the irony, okay?
Trump has actually embraced the Liz Cheney policy position while also being allowed to conduct this kabuki theater or WWF-style feud with Liz Cheney that basically just derives from Liz Cheney becoming a January 6th obsessive, voting to impeach Trump the second time.
She defended him on the first.
Then getting basically thrown out of Congress because she lost in the Republican primaries.
There's no policy content to this.
If there is, somebody should explain it to me.
Because as of 2019 and 2020, Trump was more than happy to say that he and Dick Cheney and Liz Cheney were all perfectly good pals.
So where was the ideological distinction then?
So I just wish there would be somebody out there who would point this stuff out, but nobody does.
And again, sometimes I feel like I'm going crazy.
You're not going crazy.
And again, I applaud you and your research consistency, your ideological consistency, all of it.
Look, you mentioned earlier that you see this as in some ways a problem festering in or being a product of the alternative media sphere.
But I do wonder to what degree you place some significant responsibility on the mainstream conservative news outlets who I think have really abdicated the responsibility to have any sort of adversarial interview with Donald Trump.
I mean, if we're going to hold Theo Vaughn to some standard or Joe Rogan to some standard of journalistic integrity when they really are just podcasters at the end of the day with no real obligation here, What do we say to all of the legitimate journalists on Fox News who actually have access to Donald Trump on a semi-regular basis but choose not to press him on these inconsistencies?
What do we say to all of the Republicans in office, some of whom ran against Donald Trump in a Republican primary, who at the end of that primary season reverted from any effort to be critical of Donald Trump?
And have not tried to hold him responsible for these flip flop views over time.
Views which have really serious implications as we are in the middle of multiple escalations across the world.
I do hold them responsible.
I guess maybe I'm so inert to the sycophantic relationship that these conservative media organs have with Trump that it doesn't even occur to me to notice at this point.
But no, I mean, Trump does go on Fox News a lot.
And it's always the most ass-kissing possible interview.
I guess part of what draws me to highlight the role of the independent media is that it's somewhat new and novel and therefore worth commenting on or analyzing.
I went to a Trump town hall, they call it, in Georgia a couple of weeks ago.
And I had done the same with Kamala Harris.
I tried to be fairly impartial in covering both candidates.
Again, a crazy idea to most people.
But Kamala Harris, I went to her Univision town hall, okay, in Las Vegas, and I found out that the audience was basically stacked with supposedly undecided voters who came...
Who turned out to be recruited by a casting company and they showed up, they told me, because they wanted to demonstrate their support for Harris.
So it totally flew in the face what the entire premise of this fake town hall was.
But then I went to a Trump town hall hosted by Fox News the following week in Georgia, sold as just consisting of generic women voters for Trump to talk about women's issues.
And it didn't take that much effort to go and chat with some of these ladies who were in the all-women audience and they were recruited to come because Fox sent the attendance information to local Republican women's groups.
And it was just a Trump pep rally.
And the Kamala Harris story that I did went viral on the internet.
Lots of people covered it.
Lots of aggregating sites picked it up.
The Trump story, it didn't.
So I don't know what to make of that necessarily.
Maybe people don't care or they have a really good interest in Trump and therefore don't want to highlight anything that's unflattering of him.
But this is a constant theme that I note.
And yeah, it's true.
I do want to go ahead.
Just quickly, I think what part of that might be is that both the conservative or right-leaning independent media and right-leaning mainstream media are in lockstep in wanting to cover, I think, legitimate criticism of Kamala Harris in addition to illegitimate ones.
What's really funny about the left I won't call them left.
The liberal mainstream media is that they seem to only want to cover Trump stories that are about decorum.
Criticizing him for saying something that seems outlandish, dancing awkwardly on stage, having orange makeup on, saying something that they can compare to Adolf Hitler, those sorts of things.
But they never, ever focus on the kinds of criticisms that Trump's own base would actually care about.
Only sort of lib fetish If Trump betrays his promises, if Trump is actually the hawkish one, if Trump is anti-worker,
if he genuinely betrays his base, if he declines to drain the swamp, if he is bought out by corporate interests, Democrats are interested in covering those stories in large part because they have Similar issues in their own cohort with their own candidates, but also because they don't believe there's any legitimate reasons why any voter would actually like Donald Trump.
They think it's 100% about racism and bigotry.
And as a consequence, when there are those potential fissures that they could be exploiting to point out to Trump voters that he's not the guy that they think he is, they can't even see it.
So I do think that's part of what's going on.
Yeah, and then the danger, the resulting danger is that for casual news consumers, like the people who would be in the Joe Rogan audience, for instance, who maybe just pick up snippets here and there.
And again, I'm not even...
I'm not denigrating Joe Rogan at all.
I'm a long-time Joe Rogan listener myself.
But Joe Rogan isn't a journalist, and I wouldn't expect him to perform a journalistic function when he's interviewing Trump.
And that's an indictment, in a way, of the larger media landscape, which has failed to perform its proper function in scrutinizing both candidates properly.
Average Joe Rogan listener, the only critiques they ever really hear of Trump are the shrieking, liberal, superficial, facile critiques where they do often distort like a wisecrack that Trump makes or they do make these hyperbolic comparisons to Hitler and Nazi Germany.
He wants to assassinate Liz Cheney.
Yeah, I mean, this nonsense or like he's, I'm sorry, like screaming racism over and over again has diminishing returns, especially if you have a proven track record of not accurately conveying what it is that Trump was actually saying or exaggerating or, you know, people tune out the histrionics about Trump.
So they're totally deprived of a reasoned, rational critique of Trump, right?
So yes, that is largely the fault of the more mainstream corporate traditional media.
And so you never hear people cover stuff like, I don't know, Trump tried to do regime change in Venezuela.
Trump did create a state of war, as Tulsi Gabbard herself said in January of 2020.
She's abandoned that critique at this point.
But she accused Trump of initiating or instigating a state of war with Iran.
By launching a drone strike assassination of the top Iranian general.
And Trump in this current campaign is going around saying, calling on Israel to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities.
He's parading around with Miriam Adelson, pouring $100 million into his campaign because she was so pleased with the return that her and her late husband Sheldon's investment got when Trump was first in power in terms of Israel policy.
And of course, she's fanatically, quote, pro-Israel.
And what does that foretell for a second Trump term?
Well, I would hope that more media would cover that, but they don't.
Instead, they get fixated on these trivialities and trying to gin up bogus controversy to understand why the Joe Rogan typical audience member is not really interested in hearing Trump critiques because they think it's all BS because they're not exposed to the real...
And I want to get to one more part of the real critique here with you, which is Israel.
And please bring up the photo that I took today.
This is in Fort Washington, Pennsylvania, of a sign that's being put out there as one of the closing messages, I guess, for the Trump campaign or whatever Republican operative is putting this stuff up.
It's indicative of the message that they're trying to hammer home here.
So that's Save Israel, Vote Trump.
Okay?
Again, maybe I'm crazy, but for all the faults that I think are correctly assigned to Kamala Harris and Joe Biden in terms of how they've conducted the policy in the Middle East over the past year, Trump is permitted to go with imams in Michigan and insinuate that maybe he'll be preferable to Kamala Harris and Joe Biden because he wants to end the war without ever specifying what that would even mean because If
you look at what his record was as president, it was more deferential than anybody to Israel.
He put Jared Kushner in charge of the Israel-Palestine portfolio.
I interviewed Trump's co-chairman for his transition team, Howard Lutnick, who told me directly that Jared Kushner's intensively involved You know, he did everything imaginable that Israel could possibly want.
That's why Benjamin Netanyahu goes around and proclaims Trump to be the most pro-Israel president of all time.
That's why Trump himself proclaims that.
That's why every pro-Israel, quote-unquote, not every, but many pro-Israel Donors, like even Paul Singer, who is a head-funge billionaire who once opposed Trump back in 2015, 2016, why he's pouring five million, millions of dollars into Trump's campaign operation, because they rationally view Trump as a vehicle for enacting their interest, which is a hardline, zealous pro-Israel policy.
Again, I'm not excusing the Democrats by pointing this stuff out at all.
Democrats more have secular Jews, I think, in their coalition who are hardcore pro-Israel in their own way, but less messianically religious.
Trump brings to the fore a certain kind of pro-Israel activist, and he goes to their events where they present him with awards Like the Zionist Organization of America, the Israel Heritage Foundation, where he has people on stage with him saying that we need to put Donald Trump back in the White House because that will enable us to rebuild the Third Temple, meaning destroy the Alaska Mosque in Jerusalem and rebuild the Third Temple.
Now, is that likely to happen?
Probably not, but you get a sense of the types of people who are adamant about wanting Trump to win.
Itmar Ben-Gavir, like the fanatical messianic Minister in the current Israeli government.
He was so passionate about the need to endorse Trump that he breached ministerial protocol and publicly endorsed Trump.
So I just feel like there's stuff like this that ought to be better covered.
And sometimes I feel like I'm spitting into the wind.
You know, we've covered a little bit on this show, but maybe not enough because if people, you know, are I'm alienated with the Middle East war, which I am as well, and that's part of why I didn't vote for either candidate.
But I specifically did not vote for either candidate because Donald Trump is not unclear about his policy on Israel.
He said that he's calling for the war to end.
He's calling Israel to accelerate its pulverization campaign so that it can declare victory quicker.
And I think that should be noted.
I want this to be helpful, what I'm about to say.
I feel your frustration, I empathize with your frustration, but I also believe it is a consequence of the two-party system.
The fact, the reason why so many liberals Who say that they care about Palestine are going to walk into the voting booth and hand Democrats a mandate to continue funding and perpetuating and enabling this genocide is because they believe that for all of her faults, for all of the blood on her hands, for all of her genocidal culpability, Kamala Harris is better than Trump.
And the same is true on the other side, even though I think there are legitimately good faith, anti-war Folks on the right who do not want American tax dollars to be going in unprecedented volumes to the state of Israel, whether or not they care about the humanitarian crisis on the ground or whether it's simply a financial concern, they don't want it.
And yet they will line up and they will vote for Donald Trump because they think on some other set of issues he is better than the alternative.
And there was only one way to break out of this.
And with all due respect, Michael, I don't think it's not voting.
Because that allows both sides to continue to exploit these marginal issues that they can feed to their base as grist to get them to the polls one last time, even though these big ticket issues that are very important to them, these core, basic, fundamental, working class issues that are so important to them, These existential issues like entire towns wiped off the map due to flooding and these environmental crises that were happening are just simply not on the table.
And if you want to get people to lock in, in my experience during this election season, If you want people to lock in to actually not feeling despondent and like all they have to do is vote for the lesser of two evils, you have to give them a path where you have to demonstrate the utility and investing in building alternative party systems that can ultimately tear down this two-party system.
There was once a time, speaking specifically of the Middle East, there was a moment in American history where there was an issue that was so polarizing, that was so innervating to the public, but that was not reflected on either of the two major parties' ticket.
That a third party emerged and is now what we consider today the Republican Party and the issue with slavery.
And I do think that there is a very strong argument that the level of political disaffectation is getting so high in the United States of America that it is time for people with platforms to start making the argument for why both the corporate Democratic Party and the corporate Republican Party need to be unmoored, need to be defeated.
And for me, my experience talking to people specifically about not just resisting the other side, but affirmatively building a party that can actually advocate for their interests because it does not take corporate money, fundamentally is able to move differently and act differently and speak differently because it is not bought by AIPAC, which both of our corporate parties are, is the difference in getting people to be engaged and invest in the kind of very meaningful critiques that you're making on both sides of the aisle.
Just to defend myself briefly and then we'll wrap up.
I did cast a vote, right?
I went into the polling booth.
Okay, I didn't realize that.
I cast a vote, but I wrote in, you know, a fictional character.
Like Donald Duck or something you said, yeah.
I'm Fred Flintstone.
And I realized in hindsight that I was channeling a sense of foreboding about how either Kamala Harris or Donald Trump could send us hurtling back into the Stone Age, albeit one less cheerful than the Flintstones inhabited.
But I did that, you know, not necessarily to be cute.
And, you know, every four years I tell people how I vote just in the interest of transparency.
I'm not saying anybody should follow what I do.
But, you know, it's not for me to start a third party.
Like, that's not what I'm interested in doing personally.
What I do is...
Yeah.
Just to complete the thought, what I do in my capacity as a private voter is analyze the choices on offer, and if I don't relate to them or if I can't make an affirmative argument for them, then I don't vote for them.
I mean, I find the Green Party and the Libertarian Party to kind of be facsimiles of legitimate political parties.
How will they change?
I don't know.
I'm not saying I have an answer.
How will they grow?
I'm very pessimistic.
I do have an answer, Michael.
The way to get these parties to grow is to help them to get funding in part, and it will help to, in some small way, enable them to compete with the major parties.
Right now, parties like the Green Party and the Libertarian Party, although it's better funded than the Green Party, Spend millions of dollars simply resisting ballot access challenges from the Democratic and Republican parties who have no real interest in democracy.
They want to keep their stranglehold over the American public and create more and more disaffected voters.
They don't care if there's non-voters as long as the same amount of 50-50 voters come into the polls that are increasingly affluent and increasingly privileged and so they can continue to ignore the interest of all those people who don't vote.
Getting these parties to 5% of the vote enables them to get millions of dollars But it enables them to get millions of dollars in federal funding so that we can start to have different kinds of options on the ballot.
But if we keep not supporting alternatives, as hard as it is to actually grow these alternatives, 20, 30, 40, 100 years from now, Michael, you and I, God willing, are going to be sitting here across the Zoom screen from each other making the same old complaints.
And this actually gets to why the RFK Jr.
campaign and again, the comment sections of these videos actually absolutely loads whenever I say anything critical of RFK Jr.
This gets to why that whole exercise was actually not just shambolic, but I would argue pernicious in the sense that he He created this impression that he was going to be running this groundbreaking independent candidacy that could actually make inroads in the manner that you're suggesting.
maybe in part due to his name recognition, the fake mythology that he runs around parroting and that people actually buy into around the Kennedy name.
And what did he do?
I mean, he solicited donations and resources on the premise that he was going to be running this earth-shattering independent campaign that could lead to then a real third-party movement.
And then he turned on a dime and decided to subsume himself into the very, quote, duopoly that he falsely claimed that he was running to combat.
So that's another element of this.
I'm sure we could go on forever.
Brianna, any final words?
Do you make predictions or anything?
I don't.
But do you have like a...
I'm not really in that game.
But what I'm hopeful for is that, unlike RFK Jr., who I agree, offered, I think, real promise.
I mean, a lot of us, even if we disagreed with many aspects of his agenda, were hopeful that he would at least stick the landing on being an anti-war alternative in the middle of these multiple crises going on.
But he betrayed that.
I was never hopeful about RFK Jr.
because I felt that the entire foundation of the campaign was fallacious.
And I got totally castigated for that among some of these same online alternate media circles.
Well, good for you.
But for those of us who were hopeful and who were willing to give him some benefit of the doubt, even if we had substantive disagreements, because he had people like Dennis Kucinich, a stalwart progressive, independent as his campaign manager...
It became very clear when he started taking mountains of corporate money when he picked a VP on the basis of her having billions to fund his ad campaigns that we weren't going to get what he was advertised as being.
But what I am still hopeful about is how there does seem to be unprecedented interest in there being a I don't know if you've seen the polls that show that more Muslim voters support Jill Stein than do Kamala Harris.
About 42% to Kamala Harris is 41%.
This is huge and could be determinative in a number of states in the United States of America.
And even if Kamala Harris wins, even if...
The New York Party doesn't get to 5%.
There's a real model that's being shown about how voters can take their power back and vote in various blocks to advance their interests, whether it's a $15 minimum wage, whether it's labor rights, whether it is anti-interventionist politics.
And all of the listeners should really think seriously before they commit themselves prematurely to a candidate, whether it's in their state or local elections or in federal elections two to four years from now.
All right, Brianna Joy Gray, thanks as always for the spirit of discussion.
And Michael, by the way, if people want to hear more detail about these arguments, I recently started a sub stack called Briefly, and I've been doing radars like I used to do over at Rising over there, video essays, monologues that summarize some of the arguments that are being made here so people can go over there and check that out in addition to my podcast, Bad Faith.
You're much better at promoting yourself than I am.
I don't have the same elevator pitch for myself, and therefore people often don't know what the hell it is that I do, but mtracy.net, people can look it up if they want.
Brianna, hopefully we'll all be alive to pick up the pieces from tomorrow and maybe reconvene and assess.
I'd love that.
Best of luck.
Thanks for the invitation.
Okay.
Thank you.
Take care.
All right, everybody.
We are now going to be going to Zed Jelani, longtime friend of the show here.
And it is, once again, our big special edition Election Eve broadcast.
So who better to join us than Zed Jelani?
Zed, how's it going?
How are you?
I'm not well because I have a deep sense of foreboding about the election, not necessarily because I think one of the other candidates is going to win, but because it's nerve-wracking as a citizen, not even really as a journalist.
How do you feel?
Yeah, I mean, I feel like the most common question I've gotten over the past few weeks from anybody is, who do I think will win the election?
I always tell people it's very hard to say, so I don't think that's a satisfying answer.
People keep asking me, so I don't know.
It feels like something you can't avoid right now.
Yeah, I've been more uncertain about this election than I have since I've been following presidential elections as an adult, so let's say back to 2008 or so.
Usually I can pick up on trends or patterns in the electorate that I think kind of guide my intuition.
I'm not to be braggadocious to invoke Trump, but I've usually been pretty on target as to where my intuition leads me.
But now I feel like I've been failed by my intuition.
If I had to say, I'd have a premonition That Trump will win because I do think that a former president running in the manner that he is is unprecedented in the modern era.
And he benefits from people having a nostalgic recollection of his tenure because when presidents leave office, Their approval rating almost always goes up because people look back on them more fondly than when they were actually in power.
You see that with George W. Bush, Barack Obama, you know, their approval rating goes way up.
Trump is the first former president to be able to marshal that Sentiment into an electoral initiative and to a presidential campaign.
And I think that's always struck me as an underrated, underratedly powerful tool in his arsenal.
So, yeah.
Anyways, Ed, I wanted to show you a – so over the weekend, as I mentioned, I've been here in Pennsylvania, and I was able to actually interview Josh Shapiro, the governor of Pennsylvania.
And I want to play that clip and get your reaction to it.
I'm just telling you, I think this is different.
So, Governor, I want to show you an ad that Elon Musk has reportedly funded that's being micro-targeted at Jewish voters in Montgomery County.
So that's the ad, obviously.
You can see that it says that Kamala Harris stands with Palestine, not our allies, et cetera.
Obviously, they're going at Jewish demographics in Pennsylvania with that message.
Have you encountered voters...
Who are receptive to that kind of messaging?
If so, how do you address their skepticism?
I think that's an inaccurate ad, to be clear.
Have you encountered anybody who might believe it who needs to be persuaded about her position on Israel?
Let me just speak in general, because obviously I haven't seen that, and so I can't really react to it, nor do I know it's funny.
I mean, that's the same group targeting Muslims and Arabs in Michigan.
Right.
Very cynical.
Very cynical.
Look, I think that there's been a lot of cynical attempts to divide the community.
And a lot of mis- and disinformation that has been put out.
I think Jewish voters care about a lot of different issues.
Some of them care about Israel.
Some of them care about health care.
Some of them care about education.
Some of them care about criminal justice reform.
My point is, there's a whole lot of different issues.
Jews don't care about just one thing.
Understandably, a lot of Jewish voters do care particularly about Israel in this period.
When I talk to Jewish voters all across Pennsylvania, I think the vast majority of them feel more in line with where Kamala Harris is in general on issues.
And on Israel, I think there are many of them who feel as though she will keep Israel more safe.
She will be more of a stabilizing force for the Middle East.
I understand that Donald Trump likes to talk a good thing about this and make a lot of noise on it, but I think that it is that noise.
I also think that there are a number of American Jews who are deeply offended By the divisive rhetoric of Donald Trump in the Jewish community, where he talks about blaming Jews if he loses the election.
The old trope of dual loyalty, that somehow you can't be a good Jew if you don't feel a certain way about Israel.
Not my words, of course.
He says if you're Jewish, if you vote Democrat, you have to have your head examined.
I think that's deeply offensive.
And I think that, much like the comments about Puerto Ricans, I think that type of divisive rhetoric is going to happen.
Can I just ask you though, what is your understanding of what Kamala Harris' position is on Israel?
In the sense that, do you expect her to continue the Biden position of supplying Israel with lots of armaments?
I think her campaign can talk about her positions on that.
I know what my position is, and it's more in line with where Kamala Harris is than on the track.
One last thing, non-college white voters in the northeastern PA coroner, Scranton area, but even around here, that was an area where Biden had some relationship, did kind of well.
Okay, so that was also Daniel Marins from the Huffington Post, who was in the little scrum with me.
I'm curious what you make of that.
I wanted to ask him, and maybe if the producers can also get this ready, but there's an additional exchange where I ask him about the Kamala Harris strategy of...
Touting the Cheneys in the final weeks, which is still baffling to me to even say out loud, but it happens to be true.
That's the Democrats' closing argument in the 2024 presidential election, it seems.
But what do you make of that?
He has had the capacity of campaign surrogate for Kamala Harris.
He was famously nearly selected as vice president for Kamala Harris, and yet...
At this late hour, this was on Saturday that I did that interview, He won't even speak to what her position is on the Israeli-Palestine conflict or on the Gaza war or on the Middle East conflict in general.
And he basically just reverts to saying that he's of the belief that Jewish voters in Pennsylvania are more in accord with Kamala Harris than Donald Trump, but he provides really no policy specifics.
Obviously, it's very much a live issue in this election.
So you'd expect somebody who was on her vice presidential shortlist, who has obviously national aspirations, it would seem, and has served as a surrogate for her campaign to maybe be a bit more conversant in what her position actually is.
But it's concealed.
Well, as reporters, we want that, right?
And it's our job to get that, right?
It's our job to get information about what the people running for the most powerful office and the most powerful government in the world want to actually do with that power, right?
We want to know what Kamala Harris, if she's going to adjust policy from Biden, keep Biden's policies, so on and so forth.
He doesn't view his job as doing that.
He doesn't view himself as a conduit of information.
What he's trying to do is not make a headline.
He's trying to avoid making news with you or with Daniel Marans, who is with you.
And he wanted to say, I think, what in his mind was probably the safest thing, which was just to say, look, Kamala Harris is good for Israel.
She's good for stability.
Jewish voters like her, right?
Things that are not going to generate any kind of newsy take from anybody.
They're hopefully not going to alienate one set of voters or another in his mind.
So I think that's probably what he was trying to do with you.
We all know that Shapiro, if you go further back into his history, he tends to be more on the right on these issues.
He tends to have this point of view of kind of an older Jewish guy, Jewish-American guy in the United States, most of whom tend to feel like Israel is mostly on the right in the conflict, the Palestinians are obstinate and failed to make peace, and that we should generally stand with Israel in its foreign policy.
That's probably his view privately.
Honestly, what he told you was probably moderating it a little bit, right?
When he was just suggesting that she'll do what's good for peace and what's good for stability, not that maybe he wanted to say she should just take Israel's side in this conflict and not really question what they're doing.
Maybe that's his personal view or bias on it.
But I think he was just trying to be politically safe as possible and say as little as possible to you as he could.
I think that's right.
That's often the MO of politicians to say as little as possible about their actual views and demonstrate themselves as team players.
But If we can bring up this next portion of the exchange, it was notable to me that Shapiro could have been much more enthusiastic in his backing of the Kamala Harris campaign strategy of parading around with Liz Cheney in the final two weeks of the election with the idea of appealing to Traditionally, Republican voters who may be repelled by Trump.
I mean, the Democrats have tried this in various forms for the past two elections, and they've gone full bore with it this election, with Kamala Harris barely even pretending to appeal to more progressive voters.
She didn't have to run a primary, right?
So she didn't even have to go through the process where that might have been more incumbent on her.
And she dove directly into making these Entries to Republican voters and saying that, you know, the Liz Cheney-style Republican or even the George W. Bush-style Republican, they're fully welcome in the Democratic coalition as it exists in 2024.
So I put that to Josh Shapiro, and I thought his answer was somewhat illuminating.
So let's play that.
As president, it would be to do the same as the federal government.
And I think that's only important for federal government jobs.
But it's also important to make clear that you value experience.
You value someone's background, whether in the military, at a trade school, in the union partnership.
All of those things are critically important as ways to You know, engage more people in the economy.
One last question.
One last question.
Have you had any reservations about the Harris campaign so emphasizing their support from Dick and Liz Cheney in these past couple months, especially if you might be a Muslim voter, any kind of voter who remembers their legacy in the Bush administration invading Iraq, and Kamala Harris touts them almost more than anybody.
I think that's a question for the campaign as to their rationale.
Well, I'm not going to second guess their campaign with 72 hours to go.
They've made the decisions that they've made.
She has clearly got momentum.
I feel really good about our chances.
Okay, so Zed, Josh Shapiro could have said, yeah, the Kamala Harris campaign is totally brilliant.
In amplifying Liz Cheney in the final stages of the campaign.
I'm so excited by the strategy that they've undertaken.
I think it's going to be super successful and good on them for their Masterful political tacticianship.
But instead, if you notice, what he says is, look, I mean, that's a question you should put to the campaign.
I'm not going to second-guess them.
I've never heard a less enthusiastic endorsement of a campaign strategy from one of the most prominent national circuits for a presidential campaign in the final stages.
So, yeah, obviously he's trying not to create a hubbub or for anybody to be able to write a story or make a report that there's some friction between Shapiro and Harris in terms of campaign strategy, but I think what he didn't say there is notable, and he's obviously declining to offer any kind of resounding endorsement of this Cheney strategy.
Yeah, I mean, I think that he probably was sensitive to where you were coming from with the question in that the thing about the Cheney endorsement is that it's something that both sides are talking about, right?
Normally, your endorsers are people who you're boasting and bragging about because you think they're going to bring votes to you.
And the other side just kind of keeps quiet about them because, you know, it's not trying to call attention to good news for you.
But in this case, I think the Trump campaign also is trying to make The Liz Cheney endorsement a liability for Harris by bringing in various unsavory aspects of Liz Cheney's worldview or ideology that could alienate independents or people who are not already hardened supporters.
You know, it's possible Shapiro senses that maybe the question was kind of getting at that, which probably would require him digging into the situation war to try to defend it or figure out the pros and cons that he's comfortable doing, given that he's supporting this campaign, right?
And he's not really trying to create a, you know, a back and forth with you about Liz Cheney.
I mean, I think that here is people really want Republican votes, and that's logical and rational.
Just as Trump people probably want the votes of Democrats, I think they try to do that somewhat with Kennedy and Gabbard, maybe with not a lot of success because of where they are in the party.
But, you know, Cheney does come with her own baggage, and that is something that, you know, that phrase, any port in a storm, you know, that's kind of the situation, right?
If they had Mitt Romney's endorsement, I'm sure they would love to go around with Mitt Romney everywhere, right?
Like, the same playbook would be used.
Because that's generally...
That's generally what you try to do at this stage in the presidential election, right?
You don't just rally your supporters.
You try to bring in new folks into the tent.
I think that's what they're trying to do with Liz Cheney.
But I don't think Liz Cheney ever really was that prominent or popular of a person in the Republican Party to begin with.
And probably for the past two, three years, she's been more or less a Democratic surrogate anyway.
So she probably isn't getting them a whole lot.
I don't think she has the exact same toxicity as her dad, because her dad is associated with something else, like almost entirely with the war in Iraq.
And he was always an unpopular politician.
But at the same time, she's probably not moving the needle a whole lot on this.
I think it's just a hard space for Harris to be in, given her own political orientation and where she comes from.
Her background is coming from the Bay Area of California.
That's not exactly the You know, it's not the resume that Republicans are looking for for someone they can trust to kind of meet them in the middle on border or social, cultural issues.
I mean, I saw that Cheney was recently, like, attacking some of the abortion laws, and I was like, okay, maybe that kind of helps if you were waging a campaign about abortion to, like, change those laws to have her come to the state and talk about that.
But it's not necessarily the best way to bring in Republican voters in the homestretch is to Kind of criticize their laws.
I mean, on the other hand, Kamala Harris could have said, you know, I understand where some pro-life people are coming from.
I understand why they've had some of these laws.
I wouldn't quite do these laws, but like, you know, we can talk about compromise there, but she's actually very strident there.
So no, for the most part, I don't think her strategy is working.
In terms of bringing in Republican voters, as you mentioned, it's been part of the strategy the past couple of elections.
The thing that does it probably the most is just Trump's own conduct, right?
I talk to Republicans where I live outside Atlanta who don't like Trump's conduct.
Almost universally, educated Republicans who live in the suburbs, commute into Atlanta, do not like Trump's character at all.
And most of them are still going to vote for him just because they prefer his policy framework.
They prefer their party being in power.
A few will not, I think, because they didn't like January 6 conduct or they didn't like his personal conduct.
But that's almost like baked in, right?
Like, this is like obvious, just like watching Trump.
It's not because Liz Cheney made an argument to them, right?
So like, there is going to be some Republican crossover to the Democratic Party.
I don't know how much of it is actually brought on by any of Kamala Harris's campaign strategy.
It doesn't seem to be like very much.
In the battleground states or swing states or whatever cliche we want to use, if you drive around, you see endless billboards that have been funded, I think, by a Democratic-adjacent group.
It gives a prototypical-looking Republican, and the billboard says, I'm a Republican, and I'm not voting for Donald Trump.
Whereas you don't see a lot of appeals being made to People who consider themselves a progressive voter, forget the foreign policy element.
I mean, the Kamala Harris campaign has basically disregarded anybody who might be an opponent of the status quo in terms of the Middle East or Ukraine.
Instead, they're going with these...
They're making these endless appeals to the Republican voters.
They're pouring millions upon millions of dollars into that effort.
It's nothing new.
I remember Barack Obama in 2008 touted the endorsement of Colin Powell.
Even though Colin Powell had gone, you know, he was the Secretary of State in the Bush administration, had gone before the U.N. and claimed that the U.S. government had evidence of weapons of mass destruction and then was, you know, embraced by Obama.
So there's nothing really new about this ritual, I suppose.
But I think it's...
Well, generally speaking, endorsements really...
I mean, endorsements, generally speaking, don't really move votes.
I mean, that's just the reality.
Like, people always suggest they might.
There's very little evidence that they would.
I think one of the rare pieces of evidence was when Obama was running against Clinton, some political scientists did study Oprah's endorsement, and apparently that did help, which I can kind of believe because she's not really a political figure and had never gotten involved at that level in presidential politics, and she was an extremely trusted cultural icon.
So on rare cases it would help, but I don't know.
I could see – I mean I could see – it's not uncommon to encounter people who were devotees of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., I think that's a little bit different because it's not just an endorsement.
They're not just telling you to vote for Trump.
They're kind of telling you to vote for themselves because Kennedy's going to be in the administration, right?
I don't know if he'd be a cabinet secretary because honestly it'd be hard for him to get a Senate vote to get in, but he at least will be picking key positions, right?
He almost merged his campaign with Trump's campaign, which, by the way, is one way the Democratic Party could always handle the Green Party, although they never choose to do that because, I don't know, they're just kind of arrogant about it.
But I don't think Gore was ever like, okay, Ralph, you can join my campaign and have some policies.
But yeah, Trump was actually kind of smart to do that.
I'm talking about politically.
I'm not talking about the substance of it, which is a different story.
But yeah, I do think, Mike, that is a good point that you raised about Kennedy.
That was a very unique situation where they're almost building a coalition, right?
Well, Musk.
I mean, I think people who think that voting for Trump is a vote for Musk to have some control over the federal bureaucracy or whatever.
I mean, maybe they're especially potent endorsements because it's not just somebody saying, I support this candidate, please vote.
Vote for him because you, like me, it's that, like, you're getting me as a joint package, allegedly.
We don't know what role either of these people would actually have.
I don't know that Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
has even said that he would want to be a cabinet secretary.
He could easily just get some obscure advisory role at, like, the federal drug administration and not have that much of an impact.
He's hinting that he will do staffing at things like HHS and FDA. I don't know, like, you know, like, I don't know that they want to submit him as a cabinet secretary because then he'd have to go through Senate hearings, which I think would be very, very rough for him.
But they could easily give him an advisor spot where he's more or less picking those people who may be a little bit more politically palatable to staff those agencies.
And it seems like that's what he's hinting.
It seems that's what Lutnik was hinting in those, the transition chair was hinting in those interviews that you had mentioned.
But yeah, I do think, no, that was a very unique part of this campaign.
And it's also another factor that makes it difficult to predict who's going to win, right?
Because Kennedy's name is actually still on the ballot in a few battleground states, right?
He wasn't allowed to remove them.
Wisconsin, Michigan.
He's actually on the ballot in Iowa as well, which I don't even know that he attempted to remove himself from, maybe because nobody thought that it was in contention.
Then we had this...
You know, gold standard poll, which may or may not be true, but the pollster Ann Salter does have a fairly impressive track record saying that because of huge shifts among particularly older white female voters, maybe motivated by the abortion issue, that Kamala Harris is actually ahead of Trump in Iowa.
I mean, if that's true, then our entire perception of this election has been off.
In ways that have not been fully appreciated or at all appreciated for many months.
But Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
is on the ballot in Iowa because, you know, he missed the deadline.
And even to withdraw himself, I don't actually know if he attempted to.
But if it is that close, then, you know, him being on the ballot could potentially make a difference even though he's suspended his campaign and told his supporters to not vote for him anywhere to vote for Trump.
So yeah, that's a wild card.
So Zed, one thing that I've been doing along with Megan O'Rourke who works for System Update is just going around and doing basically man on the street type interviews.
People can maybe dismiss the utility of man on the street interviews, but I always find them illuminating because there's always like some...
Style of voter who you would never kind of just in your own mind necessarily conjure up as existing out in the wilderness, but they really do exist.
I mean, people have such a panoply of views in the U.S., and I think it's actually worthwhile to go out and do just kind of compile a random sampling of voters and just take their temperature.
And I wanted to play you one of the interviews that we did yesterday in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, and get your reaction to it.
So, some people will try to argue that Trump is such a massive threat, that he's going to destroy democracy, that he's going to bring some kind of tyranny, that everybody needs to vote against me if we don't support who he's running against, necessarily.
But you don't buy into that.
Those are scare tactics, in my opinion.
He doesn't have enough power to overthrow democracy.
He's only going to be allowed to do what they tell him to do.
What do you think of that argument?
Yeah, I concur 100%.
It's not like as if he's a monarch or a king and he can just decree a thing and it is.
So it's only so much he's going to be able to do.
And I do think a lot of things that you're saying in media right now are simply scare tactics for whatever reason.
If you had to choose between the two of them, let's say a gun to your head or hypothetically, would you have a preference or...
If I had to gun to my head because of certain spiritual beliefs I have, I don't stand for abortion at all.
I would just have to go Kamala on that basis.
With Trump, I'm sorry.
Trump, yeah.
Gun to my head, I would have to go with...
Okay, so the other guy says he's going to go with Kamala, but I'm always interested in the guy who said that if he had state of preference, it would be for Trump, but he says he's not voting.
He also doesn't buy what he calls the scare tactics that are employed incessantly by the more mainstream liberal-oriented media and hyping the allegedly cataclysmic threat of Trump.
He kind of sees him as, you know, part and parcel with the rest of the political system, nothing too aberrational or dangerous.
But I'm sort of fascinated by types of undecided or non-voters.
So those people were not voting, not because they're apathetic, but because they've chosen to abstain.
And I'm in a similar boat myself.
I wrote a whole essay about how I didn't vote for either Kamala or Trump.
But I'm wondering what you make of that type of voter out there and what...
What it tells you about their information consumption, habits potentially, and the choice that they've made to disengage from this particular election cycle.
Yeah, I mean, I think that it would be difficult to say without speaking to those gentlemen further from beyond what I saw in the video.
But that's, you know, there's a fair number of people you talk to who will say things similar to what they said.
They will generally...
It suggests that they don't expect there to be a massive change as a consequence of certain people being elected, or they just can't really pick who they think would be better or worse.
And so they don't feel very strongly about voting.
I think also, you know, the one gentleman spoke to you and said, you know, when you were asking them about, you know, what's the worst that could happen when Trump got elected, they didn't really buy the idea that Trump would Eliminate American democracy or establish a monarchical or autocratic system.
When he said that, what I thought of was, what is the actual real campaign on the issues?
I think that if you really want to see what that looks like, you look at how the campaigns are advertising.
When the campaigns are running all these ads, I've gotten bombarded with ads because of where I live.
Every time I go on YouTube, I see an ad.
Every time I get the mail, I just get another mailer.
And I voted weeks ago through early voting, and they still haven't stopped it, so I don't know what their targeting is like, but it's probably less targeted on digital than mail.
But these ads largely are not about what you were asking the man about, right?
I haven't gotten a single ad implying that Trump would be a dictator.
Or that he's a fascist, as John Kelly, his former chief of staff said, or so on and so forth.
And the reason why, I think, is because most of the pro-Camla ads I get are from her super PAC, which is FF PAC, which I think is Future Forward or Freedom Forward, I forget right now.
And actually, there was a New York Times story a few, I think a week or two ago, where that PAC was kind of, you know, they're not really allowed to directly talk to campaigns or coordinate with them, but basically the PAC was saying in the media, look, We've seen no evidence that voters really care about Trump being a dictator or believe that.
That's not their thing.
Most of the FF PAC ads that I get are about Tax cuts, Trump being super rich and looking out for rich people.
Actually, some of them have Elon in them because I guess they've decided that Elon's a negative.
I'm sure to some voters he's a negative for sure.
Generally, they imply that Trump's a rich guy, looks out for himself.
Kamala, look out for you.
Give tax cuts to middle class.
It's the same messaging that they would have used against Mitt Romney and did use.
Yeah, because I think at the end of the day, that's like the lowest common denominator among voters.
I think if you are a voter who's kind of like not sure whether you're going to vote or not, you're probably not going to believe someone walking up to you and being like, okay, next month America's going to be a dictatorship because this guy's a dictator.
You're probably going to be like, Get out of here.
That doesn't make any sense.
I live in America.
That's not the reality.
Someone who watches MSNBC all day or reads too much Atlantic magazine might believe that.
But those people are going to vote for sure.
And they're going to vote Democrat for sure too, right?
But the average person who's not really sure if they're going to vote or who they're going to vote for The reason that you're running these ads to persuade people, because that's the only reason they run these ads.
They don't run them for the Atlantic Magazine and MSNBC viewer, right?
Those people are not going to believe that, right?
So, like, they're not actually putting that in their ads.
I think that Kamala Harris' campaign spent a little bit of money on ads that are like the John Kelly story, like $10 million I read.
But most of our funding is going through Super PAC, and Super PAC's not doing ads like that.
And I imagine that's because they probably have focus groups and surveys and polls of people who are like the two gentlemen you spoke to, who they're trying to motivate to vote for their candidate to get out and actually cast a ballot.
And they just found that those people are much more likely to vote just based on normal things like, you know, your family's going to be better off, you can be able to afford groceries or a home, blah, blah, blah.
And that's generally elections.
I think so much of what we see in the elite chatter, like the people who read magazines or watch cable news nonstop, you know, you can't just keep putting a simple message like that day in, day out, and expect to get like really good ratings or more subscriptions.
You kind of have to scare people, as the gentleman says, the scare tactic.
And so like, I think that elite debate is happening out there, but I don't think it has much to do with the election.
I think the election is more based on what These candidates are putting out through advertising, which through Kamala Harris, at this point, I've mostly seen economic stuff and then also reproductive healthcare type stuff, like IVF abortion, right?
And for Trump, I mostly see ads about immigration, like 9 out of 10 of them are about immigration.
Maybe 1 out of 10 is about his tax cut plans, but it's just immigration, immigration, immigration.
So I kind of feel like both sides kind of feel like these are the issues that will get someone off the couch.
Into the polling place on Tuesday.
And not sort of the, all right, you had to read this, I don't know how many thousand words, Atlantic Magazine story.
I know who John Kelly is.
It's like 99% of Americans probably don't know who John Kelly is.
And then figure all this out and then get to like, oh, Trump's going to be a dictator.
That's a lot of logical leaps you have to get through.
And that's not your infrequent voter.
It's not your non-voter or your swing voter, right?
That's your political obsessive, right?
So I think those interviews you did, Mike, were spot on in that it kind of introduced you into the real world.
That's the universe of people.
These campaigns are begging to vote right now.
Yeah.
Okay, so finally, Zed, you have had thoughts on the Peanut the Squirrel saga, and you wrote an article where you were making an argument that there is a new bipartisan convergence around animal rights.
I'll admit that I have totally ignored the Peanut the Squirrel saga.
I don't even really know what it's about.
I mean, there's just limited bandwidth in my, I guess, Brain to even follow up on every little social media nugget that comes up.
So explain to me why I should care about Peanut the Squirrel and then I guess relate it to what larger issue you think is relevant.
Yeah, so actually I was writing a piece about this issue relating to kind of a nonpartisan, or maybe even bipartisan, but officially a nonpartisan organization that works on stopping government-backed animal testing, particularly experiments that cause a lot of pain to animals.
And so I was going to write a story about that, and then this peanut and squirrel story broke at the same time, so I used it as kind of the lead to the story, right?
This is my subset, the American Saga, so it's theamericansaga.com.
And so basically, to start with, the peanut and squirrel story, basically there was a social media influencer in New York State who had a squirrel and a raccoon in his pets, right?
And I believe the squirrel was actually an orphan, so he basically was raised by this guy.
They were fairly well domesticated, but as he became more famous and people started to complain, it turns out it's actually illegal to hold wild animals captive.
In New York, you can't have them as pets, so they were confiscated by the authorities in New York.
Then to test them for rabies, they had to euthanize them.
That's how the process works, so they were killed.
This caused a lot of uproar on social media.
Squirrel, in particular, was very popular.
I noticed a lot of the people who were part of the upworld were conservatives.
They were big fans of the squirrel.
I thought it was a tyrannical government thing for them to do that.
I use this as the hook for the story about this group called White Coat Waste.
I think what's really interesting about White Coat Waste is when we think of animal rights, we usually think of left-wing groups.
Twice as many left-leaning people are vegetarians as right-leaning people.
The heads of organizations like PETA or the Humane Society tend to be left-leaning people.
But white waste is actually made up of a mix of people, and some of them actually come out of the conservative universe.
They work for conservative nonprofits or think tanks or media outlets.
Their entire goal is just to reduce and to eliminate government spending on painful animal experimentation.
So a lot of people probably heard about the stories of beagles being tortured as part of really excruciating experiments under Anthony Fauci by the NIH. A lot of those stories were actually found and pushed forward by white coat waste, right?
And so they've had a lot of success in getting members of Congress, Democrats and Republicans to endorse their work.
They've gotten entire agencies in the government to stop painful experiments on cats and dogs and Actually, they're working with a Republican who just introduced a bill to defund a lot of this happening at the college level when it comes to these painful experiments on cats and dogs.
I guess the wider story here is that concern for animal welfare shouldn't really just be coded as a liberal progressive thing.
A lot of conservatives have a lot of the same concerns.
I do think on some issues when it comes to what you eat, It's true.
It's still more of a partisan issue.
But when you poll people about things even going up through factory farms, a lot of people across the partisan spectrum are uncomfortable with them.
They don't like how the animals are treated there.
I think they have a different image in their mind of how animals should be treated.
You have to remember this.
When it comes to things like dog or cat ownership, there's no partisan divide.
Families everywhere.
Own these animals, they get to know these animals, relate to them, and I think come to see their needs and the requirement for them to have some standard of welfare rights.
Yeah, so I think, you know, I wanted to write this story just kind of as a good news story.
I think that we're seeing a lot of partisan diversions, people fighting right now because these campaigns are really trying to get votes, but there are issues that people can agree on, and I think it's a really heartening one that folks are coming together on this one to try to help animals.
Okay, well, I think, nevertheless, I'm going to choose to opt out of the peanut the squirrel issue just to preserve my own sanity and to, I don't know, stay grounded in something like...
I don't even know what I'm saying.
I'm just not going to focus on the squirrel issue, and I admit that's somewhat arbitrary.
Okay, so closing out, Zed, are you in the prediction business?
What's a key thing you're looking for?
Put your plundit hat on for a second.
Pretend that you're Steve Kornacki at the big election board.
I've never really been one of those guys.
I don't conduct polls or watch them super closely.
I do know the politics of my state fairly well, Georgia.
I'll say this much.
One thing the Republicans did that was really unhelpful in 2020 It was that they cast like a pall of doubt about early voting and mail voting.
And so those numbers went way down for Republicans.
And some people say, well, why does that matter?
It's just like they can vote early or they can vote on election day.
It's going to be the same number of votes.
Well, not exactly, right?
Because when you're voting early, one, you're guaranteeing those people voted.
They're not going to forget to vote or just Second, they're getting data, right?
They're getting data about who's voting and when they're voting, how they're voting, so they can narrow their universe and get out to vote on their remaining voters, right?
So I do think it's helping the Republicans, at least in my state, that their early voting seems to be back to robust means in pre-2020 days, you know, the days when Republicans were not scared or suspicious about it.
And I do think that that gives them a little bit of an edge where I live.
I think something like that is happening in other places with good early voting numbers for Republicans, but I haven't followed it as closely.
And honestly, to really understand the trends, you have to be really like a real nerd about Pennsylvania or Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona.
And I'm just not, so I don't really know.
But yeah, I guess that's the best of my knowledge.
I don't want to go any further than that just because it is actually really complicated.
I think anyone who tells you Anywhere, oh, I'm super confident one person's going to win, they probably don't know.
It's too close of an election.
Well, I will certainly confess that I also don't know who's going to win, nor do I think that I have to engage in any predictive bumbo-jumbo.
And then if I'm wrong, I pay no reputational price, strangely.
So I just don't make any hard and fast predictions.
What I try to do is analyze The world around me.
And then if that has any predictive value, people can extrapolate from it.
Like, for example, as I mentioned in the intro, I do think that I've encountered a notable number of low propensity voters in Pennsylvania who, if they were contacted by a competent Republican get out the vote style operation,
maybe they could be motivated to take the plunge and actually go and vote for Trump because they Attest to a preference for Trump compared to Harris, but they're simply not motivated enough or don't have enough faith in this quote-unquote system writ large to even think that going to vote is worth their time.
So that's the profile of a certain maybe breed of voter out there that I've tried to sketch out.
So if Trump is doing this, then I think that will be enough.
No, it is very true.
The undermining faith in the vote is like a toxic thing for Republicans.
The key example of that was in 2021 when we had the Senate runoffs here, right?
Both the Senate seats went to runoffs.
And there was a drop-off in vote around 400,000 Republican voters didn't vote between the general election and then the runoff.
And when they surveyed a lot of those people later, some of the conservative nonprofits did that.
They said a lot of them just think their vote didn't count, right?
Because Trump went around telling them the vote didn't count.
Trump went around telling them the voter fraud in Fulton County or whatever destroyed their vote.
So some people do internalize that.
It's not just political rhetoric.
They really think it's true.
And so if I had to give any advice to the Republican Party, if they asked me, like, stop telling your voters that the elections are all rigged and their votes don't matter because some of them really believe it and they just stop voting.
So yeah, that is a factor for sure.
All right, Zed.
Well, best of luck tomorrow.
I don't know what I'm wishing you luck for exactly, but maybe I'm simply going to lie or subconsciously wishing it to myself.
I know I'm going to have luck.
No, I know I'm going to have luck tomorrow because I'll stop getting these stupid ads every time I do anything.
You know, I'll stop getting phone calls and texts and the whole nine yards.
And so, like, it'll be a great time to be a swing state voter tomorrow, in my opinion.
Okay.
Well, hallelujah to that.
And, Zed, thanks for joining us.
Thank you.
Well, all right, everybody.
Thank you for joining our special Election Eve show tonight.
We hope that you enjoyed the festivities.
We hope that you've enjoyed staring at my face for, I don't know, two hours, which is way too long, I think, for anybody to do in a healthy and sustainable way.
But you're a trooper if you manage to endure that.
And what else is there to say?
I mean, we all at this point have to kind of just throw our hands up in the air.
And, I don't know, maybe do a little dance, make a little love, and see what we're all beset with tomorrow.
So, in closing, if you like...
The work that we do over here at System Update, the whole crew, even Glenn in his mysterious absence, subscribe to the channel on Rumble and then also across every social media platform.
So there's X, there is YouTube, etc.
And if you're not already a subscriber at Locals, you can go to greenwald.locals.com and rectify that.
And yeah.
Let's leave it there for now, and I'm sure we'll all reconvene soon enough with the latest insanity to discuss.
So, signing off.
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