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Nov. 4, 2020 - The Megyn Kelly Show
01:05:47
20201104_election-overtime-with-charles-cw-cooke-krystal-ba
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Polling Problems and Election Margins 00:15:07
Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.
Hey everyone, welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show.
I'm Megyn Kelly, and wow, what a night.
We still don't have answers.
I guess we didn't really expect to have them, but we were kind of hoping we might.
And in my view, this race now comes down mostly to Michigan, also Pennsylvania, but my eyes are on Michigan.
Trump still has a path to victory, though it got a lot narrower when he lost Arizona.
That's 11 electoral votes he really needed.
And he needed to hold sort of his base states, given how tenuous his situation was looking in Michigan and in Wisconsin.
And he didn't.
He lost Arizona, which means he's got to win one of those two states in the Midwest that he doesn't look so strong in right now.
Anything could still happen.
Pennsylvania, he's better positioned in, though there's going to be a bunch of legal challenges.
And we should know more as the day and certainly as the week goes on.
Look, we're joined today by some great guests.
We've got Charles C.W. Cook.
We've got Crystal Ball.
We've got Sagar and Jetty.
And I'm going to get to all of them in one second.
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Now, without further ado, Charles C.W. Cook.
Charles, thank you for being here.
Can we just talk about overall thoughts?
I haven't really gotten into too much with the audience yet, but my assessment at this hour, we're taping early in the morning, mid morning on Wednesday, is it doesn't look good for Trump.
He didn't hold Arizona, and that made his challenge bigger in the upper Midwest.
And the votes, as we slept last night in Michigan, got a lot tighter.
He's a worse off in Wisconsin.
And the only way he can really win right now is by holding the outstanding votes he's got.
He's not going to win Arizona.
People think.
That somehow we're going to flip that result back around.
I trust the Fox News decision desk when they call it for him, for Biden.
And so if that stands, he's probably not going to win Nevada.
He probably will win Georgia.
Looks like he's well positioned in Pennsylvania and North Carolina, but he still can't get it done with an Arizona loss without winning Michigan or Wisconsin.
And Michigan was his best chance.
And it's extremely tight.
And there's a bunch of vote outstanding.
And typically, that doesn't look good.
If the mail in vote in Michigan comes in in the same percentages that it's been coming in, he's going to lose because Biden's been winning that vote, according to what I read, by about two to one, or at least, or possibly more, maybe even better margin.
Anyway, so he could still do it.
But he looked better last night when I went to sleep than he looks this morning now that I've woken up.
What do you think?
I think he's lost.
I ran some numbers myself.
Now I'm not especially good with numbers, but I'm good enough to do elementary math.
And given the number of outstanding ballots, I think he's going to lose Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, along with Arizona and Nevada.
Probably squeak through in Georgia, but that's just not enough.
So I think it'll take a few days.
Nevada is not going to report until tomorrow, which I find bizarre, frankly.
But I think Trump has lost, unless there is some strange voting pattern in more than one state we've never seen before, or a legal challenge cleans it up for him after the fact.
But if I were to place a bet on it today, it would be that Joe Biden has extremely narrowly won.
Why do you think he's losing Pennsylvania?
The latest news this morning from the Pittsburgh Post Gazette is that Trump is leading by 12 points, about 650,000 votes, but they're waiting for the mail in votes yet to be counted.
But that's a pretty healthy margin.
Well, it is, but there's 1.4 million votes yet to be counted.
And unless the New York Times analysts that I was reading are wrong, those are going to go overwhelmingly for Biden.
The numbers have been almost.
I think they revised that this morning to 1 million outstanding.
But still, I see your point.
Well, then he has a better chance.
I stand corrected.
But it's still not enough with the loss of Arizona.
And I do think Arizona's lost.
I think Arizona's a lot closer than it looked last night.
That one's gone in the other direction.
But it won't be enough.
He would need another state.
And it doesn't look to me as if he's going to get it.
Well, look, if he can reverse Arizona, and the reason I'm saying I don't think he can is because I've worked with Fox News.
Decision desk for years.
And those guys, they don't call it unless they are 100% certain.
I mean, they just don't.
And they've been out on a limb before on many states.
I've seen this with them year after year.
They've gone out on a limb.
They've called it.
They've gotten pushback.
You called it too soon.
I've never seen them lose.
I've never seen them be wrong and have to reverse it at any point other than, you know, the debacle of 2000 when everybody got Florida wrong.
So my history with them tells me they get it right.
Now, I know it's getting tighter in Arizona, but they look at all that.
They look at the outstanding counties.
They look at, they weight them to see are they mostly Democratic?
Are they mostly Republican?
You know, what are the percentages that typically go this way or that way?
They'll factor in a secret Trump vote.
They'll factor in all of that.
And they wouldn't have called it unless they were convinced Trump couldn't do it in Arizona.
So if he flips it, though, if he does do it, he's back in business because then he'd only need Pennsylvania.
And I mean, of course, assuming he gets Georgia, North Carolina, and the other ones we were talking about.
But then of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, he'd only have to hold on to Pennsylvania and he could lose Michigan and Wisconsin.
That's correct.
I have a model, which is a very fancy way of saying a spreadsheet, that shows Trump losing Arizona by 60,000 at the end of all of this.
So it is just about possible, in large part because Maricopa County, which has historically been Republican but has been moving toward the Democrats in recent years, is a big suburb, essentially.
It's an enormous, sprawling suburb.
And you can't always tell.
How are those votes going to come in, much as Trump has struggled with suburban voters?
But I. Concur.
I think the Fox desk got that right, although they did call it very early, surprisingly early, and I don't think it's going to turn around.
Michigan, the latest numbers are Biden's losing by about 13,000 votes, but there are some 360,000 estimated votes yet to be counted.
And again, they've been going, I think it's 67% to 32% Biden v. Trump.
So if the mail in votes.
And so if that continues, You can see why people would think Biden's going to win Michigan.
Now, you know, so we don't know, but I think we're both on the same page that as of this morning doesn't look that great for Trump.
Can we just talk about the other messages that you took away from last night?
Sure.
Well, the fact that we're having this conversation is extraordinary given the polling.
Now, I never believed that this race was.
As one for Biden, as the press and the pollsters suggested.
I often felt self conscious feeling this, and I developed this gap between my gut and my head.
But I couldn't talk my head into supporting what I was feeling, given the polls.
Once again, the polls were off.
They were dramatically off.
And it's not just in America that this is the case.
Brexit in Britain.
They were off in the 2019 British general election.
They were off in the Australian general election.
There is a problem with polling and in the media in general.
And I think it's twofold.
One, it just for some reason does not pick up centre right voters, especially centre right voters in working class areas and increasingly centre right voters in Hispanic and sometimes African American areas.
And the second problem is that I don't think anyone in the press really knows any Trump voters or knows what it would feel like to be one, knows what it would feel like to be on the other end of our ongoing culture war.
And as a result, what we saw was a prediction of a Trump landslide defeat.
And it didn't come to pass.
I mean, he almost won.
It is still possible.
Possible at the margins that he will win.
And so I think that even though Biden is likely to prevail here, this was a terrible, terrible night for the Democratic Party.
This was an embarrassing night for the Democratic Party.
They didn't get their landslide.
They didn't flip Texas.
They didn't flip Florida.
They have, it seems, won in the Midwest, but there was no repudiation.
The Republicans seem to have kept control of the Senate.
And in fact, by the same models, i.e., my spreadsheet, that I mentioned, I have the Republican Party losing only one seat net here.
And they've picked up seats in the House, they've picked up seats in state legislatures.
This was not how this was supposed to go.
This was not what we were told to expect.
And it is time, even if it is the case that Biden has beaten Trump, for people who tell us authoritatively all the time what is true and what is happening.
To realize that they don't have a particularly strong grasp on reality.
Yep, I totally agree with you.
I think my biggest takeaway last night is how these pollsters don't know anything about America, they just don't understand anything other than their quote elite.
Liberal tend to be media circles, and it's an echo chamber.
And there was a secret or shy Trump vote.
We saw it come out last night.
And as I said on this podcast a few times prior to yesterday, the only real question in the election was how big it would be.
How big would it be?
It did exist.
And shockingly to some, you saw it exist in some minority communities.
And that's really just stunned the media and the Democrats we heard on TV last night.
They could not believe.
That Hispanics went overwhelmingly for Trump in places like Miami Dade County, and he did well with them in Texas.
And they've spent four years telling us he is a xenophobic, racist bigot.
And they were melting down when you saw Trump do very well with a group who the exit polls tell us are really focused on the economy.
They're not into these identity politics.
They want to do well economically, they want opportunity.
And all the Just the pearl clutching we've seen over four years about how awful he was.
And Trump pushing back saying, no, It's your refusal.
The governors hold the governed in contempt.
And I'm here to expose it.
Resonated.
And it may not have pushed him over the finish line, but boy, oh boy, I don't think without a serious reckoning by the Democrats and the media, I just don't think anything's going to change.
I think we'll go right back into bad polls in the midterm elections and we'll have.
Two to four more years over this next election cycle of similarly biased coverage.
I don't know what it's going to take for them to get it.
You know, maybe it would have taken a clear Trump win, which again, he could still do.
You know, one of the topics that has been dear to National Review's heart of late is this illiberalism that you have begun to see in the media, in the academy, in Hollywood that drives people who disagree with whatever.
Prevailing cultural sentiments, it is assumed they should believe out of the public square.
Either that silences them preemptively by raising the cost of them saying what they really believe, or of actually trying to get them fired or to participate in a struggle session, or what you will.
And that's bad enough, but I think where it gets really sinister and really totalitarian is that those who have inflicted this illiberalism on the country seem simultaneously to have started believing that its results are real.
And so you've got a real social cost to anyone who supports Donald Trump or thinks that his message should resonate, but also this disbelief from those who are imposing that social cost that the people upon whom it's being imposed actually don't really believe it.
Silencing Voices on the Left 00:04:46
And so they convince themselves, I think, over time that they've won, that they've re educated the population.
But of course, you can't.
Take that social pressure into the voting booth.
I mean, I voted in Florida by mail.
I sat at the desk, which I work every day, and I filled in a little circle and I put it in the post box.
Nobody came and looked over my shoulder.
Nobody threatened to fire me.
Nobody told me I was right or wrong or reprehensible or virtuous.
And this is an increasing problem because it's created this disconnect between how people actually behave in their own homes and when they get to vote.
Secretly, and what people say in public, and as well as being bad in and of itself, you just don't want that sort of a liberal culture in a free country.
It's actually really harming the left because it's taking away from them any real opportunity to work out what people truly think, what they believe, what's important to them.
And again, that we were just having a conversation about whether Trump is going to squeak this out, given what we have been told, is utterly extraordinary.
And I don't think we should lose sight of that, even as Joe Biden looks likely to become president elect.
The need to hold on to identity politics as the As the source of all, you know, everything, good and bad.
If it's good, they say it's because they triumphed in their message.
If their results are bad, they say the same.
They say it's because people didn't listen to their virtue signaling.
And what we saw last night was people like Jamel Hill, who is just, I mean, she sees everything through the prism of race.
She retweeted, polls don't have an algorithm for racism, as Trump was doing well in the States.
And then she tweeted, if Trump wins re election, it is on white people.
No one else.
Meanwhile, the only group that Trump underperformed with in 2020 versus 2016, according to the exit poll so far, is white men.
He improved his margins with everyone else.
And yet you have Jamel, you have people like Arne Duncan, Obama's education secretary.
This is the guy who got rid of due process for young men on college campuses when they've been accused of sexual assault.
I mean, got rid of it entirely.
And he's never apologized.
He came out with a tweet, we need to talk a lot less about red and blue and a lot more about whiteness.
They won't let go.
They're not going to see this, even a Biden win, as some sort of proof they should move on from that message.
The message itself is destructive, but it's also farcical.
If you go down to South Florida and you talk to Hispanics from Cuba, Venezuela, Colombia, increasingly Brazil, Presumably, in the future, Chile, given the socialist reforms they're on the verge of making, and you try all of this faddy university led newspeak with them, they won't just reject it and say,
No, I don't like that.
That's not what I believe.
They will look at you funny.
I mean, this phrase, Latin X, this term, it's not just that it's silly, it's that no one in the real world has actually ever heard it.
If you look at polling on this, about 5% of Hispanics of all walks of life in all locations, Hispanic is a very wide group.
Californian Hispanics are different than Texan Hispanics are different than Floridian Hispanics.
All of them are baffled by it, if they've heard of it at all.
And 1% of them like it.
The disconnect between Jamil Hill and normal people, and when I say normal people, I'm not saying real Americans, I'm not talking about People who agree with me or don't or live in particular areas, all normal people getting on with their lives, going to work in the morning, raising families, driving to the liquor store and back, they just have no idea what the Jamel Hills of the world are talking about.
And again, that's something that needs to be fixed because it, she may as well have put out a bunch of tweets in Latin.
It's just extremely silly.
She does speak for a faction, a large faction of the Democratic Party that.
Confusing Undetermined Races 00:09:54
Sees the country as awful, and especially when it does something they don't like electorally.
You know, the actor John Cusack, who's been terrible.
He sent out a tweet last night.
This is an utterly damning portrait of decadence and decay.
These aren't votes for policies or ideologies.
They are votes for a man who is mentally ill and killing people in a pandemic and a child abducting rapist and racist.
The soul of the United States is deathly sick.
Ah!
Who are these people?
They don't, you know, meanwhile, you have sane people like Joe Trippi, who we had on the show yesterday, Democrat pollster and analyst saying, look, Biden's going to win.
He said he's going to get the 270.
But this has been a rejection.
It's been a rejection of elites.
We scoffed at the attacks on Joe Biden as a socialist.
We rolled our eyes.
But this was a rejection of elites.
And he says, and as someone who's read polls for 40 years, it's all broken.
People don't want to hear this, he said, but we have to come out of our silos and talk to Republican voters.
Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned the socialist attack, as it's called.
Because I was struck last night by how patronizing some of the explanations I saw for the way that Floridians voted, especially were.
The explanation that popped up almost immediately was well, Trump and his friends went down into South Florida and they tricked the voters there.
They tricked them.
As if they're children, as if they're idiots.
And they're not.
They're not.
They're normal human beings.
They're no better or worse than anyone else.
But if your view is that the people that you are dealing with are children who can be easily tricked, then you're going to behave a certain way.
And it's probably not a way that's going to win many majorities.
Can we spend one minute on just how wrong the polls were?
I mean, Nate Silver had Donald Trump with a 31% chance of winning Florida, 31% chance.
Washington Post had Biden up 17 points.
Going into this election, you go through the list of like the margins that they were giving Biden in state after state after state.
In states, it looks like Trump is still going to win, right?
I don't know.
I mean, is polling over?
What does this do to polling?
I don't think they know much more about what's happening in America than I do.
And it's sad because polling is a useful tool, it's perhaps an overused tool.
And that also goes to our tendency, and perhaps the tendency in any democracy, to assume that if a majority is in favor of something, it must be good.
But it is a useful tool.
And it's used for more than just predicting elections, it's used as a calibration tool by politicians to work out what to think and what people want.
And something I've been thinking about recently is if the polling is so off when it comes to predicting elections.
Maybe it's completely off when it comes to finding out whether a policy is popular or not, or voters think that a proposal is a good idea or not.
And that's a problem.
I'm really enjoying dunking on the pollsters.
This has happened over and over again.
But I wish they were better at what they do.
And to be honest with you, it strikes me that we're just going to have to have a complete rethink, whether it's partly because.
The pollsters are biased or insular, whether it's partly because people don't want to talk to them for whatever reason, or whether it's partly because.
Because people's habits are different now.
You know, if you watch any movie in the 1980s, they stand in the kitchen with the phone and there's a cord that goes from the phone up to the cradle.
That's obviously not how people live now.
And polling hasn't really caught up with that, it's still built around an older model.
Well, and it's also affected by what happens in the media, which is 100% against the Republicans and certainly Donald Trump.
And so, even if you have the best method for connecting with people, this is what Trafalgar's been saying, they're not going to tell you the truth.
You know, that's there.
We saw evidence of that yesterday with this, you know, the shy Trump voter.
I want to ask you two quick things.
So, you mentioned that you think the GOP is going to hold the Senate.
How confident are we of that?
I mean, they needed a flip.
If Biden wins, the Democrats need to flip a net of three seats.
It doesn't look like they're going to, from what I've seen, but how confident are you that's not happening?
I'm fairly confident.
That there will eventually be a Republican majority.
At the moment, the remaining seats are Maine, where Susan Collins looks as if she's going to win, North Carolina, which hasn't been called, but Tillis has declared himself the winner and no one has argued with him, Alaska, which I'm not worried about, Michigan.
I think John James, unfortunately, is going to lose at the last, but that won't change the.
Overall balance.
And then the two seats in Georgia.
So this could change.
What about those?
Is that they're a weird situation?
I don't totally understand the Georgia situation.
I just know that it's some sort of a runoff they may have.
Like it confuses me to be, it's like a pair of undetermined races in Georgia that may require yet another vote.
Is that going to affect the Republican likely control?
Yes.
So what happens in Georgia is if a candidate doesn't get to 50%, then there's a runoff election.
So, in one of the races, Purdue versus Ossoff, there are two candidates, and as long as Purdue makes it over 50%, he will win and he will be certified immediately.
In the other race, there were three candidates there were two Republicans and one Democrat, and so none of them obviously got to 50%.
So, that race is going to be held in a few weeks, I think in early January, and that will be between the Democrat, Warnock, and Kelly Loeffler, who beat.
Doug Collins between the two Republicans in the race.
So if she loses, then they would go down to 51, but they would still have a majority, all things being equal.
Can you imagine what life is going to be like, Charles, if you have Biden in the White House and a GOP controlled Senate?
I mean, what does that do to the Biden agenda?
I mean, because these Republicans are going to be more motivated by, I think, Trump politics than ever.
They've been rewarded for them.
At their level, they, you know, the voters may have not liked the man, Trump.
Um, but if the Republicans hold on to the Senate, a different message has been sent about the promised Biden agenda.
Yeah, it'll be interesting in that Joe Biden, if he does prevail, is going to be the first president of the United States since 1988 not to come into office with a majority in both houses.
Every other president came in with control of the Senate and the House since 1988.
And that's going to change the locus of power.
Usually, the president comes in.
He's new, he's exciting, he's popular, he's in his honeymoon period, and you get your first 100 days.
You get this explosion of energy and effort.
And the congressional party, which tends to believe it is there on the coattails of the president, goes along with it, helps.
Of course, that's not going to happen this time.
You're going to have presumably Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell with a completely different agenda to Joe Biden's.
So, a lot of the things on Joe Biden's wish list will just disappear until it's too late.
Well, tax hikes, gun control, court packing, the abolition of the filibuster, pretty much everything on that.
The public option, any changes to fracking on federal land that can't be done via regulation, all that's gone.
And of course, although there will have to be some compromises on judges, crazy left wing judges will.
Probably be rejected where you might see some harmony in Washington for once.
Uh, will be, and you've guessed this, Megan, spending lots of money.
Uh, because there's going to be a bipartisan desire to mitigate the shock of coronavirus, and there is still a bipartisan desire, especially in a more populist Republican party, to do some infrastructure.
Never got done under Trump, it probably will get done.
Under Biden.
But other than that, you'll be looking at relatively calm waters unless something unforeseen happens.
What happens now?
The Nuts of Fraud Claims 00:05:46
I don't mean to pronounce Trump's death sentence in this race because he is still in it.
Charles and I are just being realistic about the numbers that are outstanding and using the percentages of vote that have been allotted to each candidate based on the vote coming in so far.
So he could still win.
So I don't mean to be too dour on his chances, though math is math.
Right.
So it's like you have to be realistic.
But what happens now if Trump did not win?
Because we've been talking about legal challenges and so on.
As I see it, those are mostly going to be Pennsylvania and North Carolina legal challenges.
I haven't heard a lot about likely legal challenges in Michigan or Arizona.
So it could be a quote unquote clean win if he loses in those states as opposed to, and maybe wins in Pennsylvania.
But does he, do you think he would concede?
And what of the Republican Party?
You know, his imprint to me seems pretty secure.
I dread the coming weeks.
I dread the coming weeks if Trump has lost, because I suspect that he will claim that he has won.
The idea that he was going to barricade himself in the White House was always far fetched.
And it also conceded too much.
It's not his decision whether he wins or loses.
And it's not his decision whether he stays as president or not.
But he does have a bad habit of.
Pretending that he won things that he didn't.
Think back to the popular vote in 2016, of throwing around charges of fraud where there was little evidence, and of trying to bludgeon his way through difficult situations.
This is a difficult situation.
It's a sensitive situation.
It's the situation none of us wanted.
And the instincts that he showed last night were frankly disgraceful.
And you know, they are why he's not taking a victory lap this morning, having won.
A bigger victory, a cleaner victory.
He's his own worst enemy.
That he behaves in this way is why so many people couldn't vote for him.
And just in case people don't know what you're talking about, he came out and declared himself the winner last.
He said, Frankly, I have won.
Yeah, I think we have actually a soundbite just in case.
Take a listen.
We will win this.
And as far as I'm concerned, we already have won it.
So I just want to thank you.
Yeah.
So they haven't already won it.
That's not true.
And he got a lot of flack for suggesting that because it's one thing to stretch the truth or be full of puffery on a subject when it's relatively low stakes or people can understand that that's all it is.
But in a presidential election, it's extraordinary to have one candidate say that.
Before all the votes are counted, and when it's very much uncertain.
Yeah, it's an abhorrent lie, and it hurts him too.
There are two reasons why politicians should not do that.
The main one is that it hurts the country, it damages the office, and it erodes trust in our institutions, which matter.
That's the main one, that's the most important one.
The second one is that it's against their self interest.
You actually gain a lot in life by saying, We will wait and see.
I want this process to be fair.
If I've lost, I've lost.
If I've won, I've won.
And I hope to see the results upheld.
Because then, if you do claim that you've won for good reason, people don't think that you're just blustering through and lying.
Well, he's now said something that isn't true.
That's not to say he hasn't won, he could still win.
But what he said was untrue last night and it's untrue this morning, and it does bode ill, I'm afraid.
And if he carries on like that, then whatever his long term.
Effect on the Republican Party and on the country, much of which has been good, will be clouded out and he will leave under a cloud.
Yeah, he doesn't want that to be the final message.
But I don't know.
You know, I'm sure the legal teams are pouring over every single thing that happened last night in Michigan.
When I went to bed, Trump had a lead over 100,000.
And then apparently what happened was in like an instant, it was cut in half.
And people were saying, where did all those votes come from?
You know, there's all sorts of conspiracy theories.
But one thing I'm comforted by is that the Trump team will make good and sure that if Biden has won this thing, every vote is as legitimate as we can know.
And I'm in favor of some legal testing here.
I really am.
I think it's kind of nuts how in Pennsylvania they're talking about, you know, well, maybe, you know, we're going to try to figure out if a postmark is smudged, whether it really was dated prior to Election Day or on Election Day.
Like that's.
That's nuts.
That can't happen.
That's exactly how voter fraud happens.
And there's no leeway in the law for these vote counters to be making those determinations.
That was never considered that some vote counter would be making subjective decisions about how to figure out whether this vote counts or not.
It's like if the postmark's clear, you can count it.
If it's not, it's got to go in the to be contested pile at least.
Anyway, so for what it's worth, that's our predictions.
I mean, Charles and I are on the same page when it comes to the math.
I will confess it's never been my strong suit.
But people who are smarter than I am are saying this is how it looks for Trump in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and so on.
Charles, thank you so much.
Thank you so much for having me.
So in just a minute, we're going to be joined by Crystal Ball and Sagar and Jetty, co-hosts of risingonthill.com for their take.
Jody Shaw Takes a Stand 00:05:06
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Okay, before we get to our guests, I want to tell you about a woman.
Named Jodie Shaw.
This is part of our devil may care All Stars feature that we want to bring to you.
These are people standing up against cancel culture or the ridiculous identity politics we see everywhere.
And this woman comes from all places, Smith College, one of the most liberal, we might be number one, could be number one, most liberal college campus in the nation.
And I highly recommend looking at her video online because when you meet Jodie Shaw, you see she's not particularly forceful in her delivery.
She's a staffer at Smith.
She's not on the faculty, which she makes sure to point out.
But this woman is kind of a badass.
She's taking a stand against their desire to push everyone around based on skin color.
And Jody has decided to do a series of videos offering specific examples of what's happening at Smith and pushing back against the faculty and the student body and shouting out to the other folks on Smith who are sick of it, saying, Come talk to me.
This is protected discussion.
We cannot be fired.
For pushing back against this nonsense.
And she's leading the charge.
Here's a sample of what Jody has to say.
I ask that Smith College stop reducing my personhood to a racial category.
Stop telling me what I must think and feel about myself because I feel like you do that a lot.
I know you do that a lot, and I need you to stop doing that.
Stop presuming to know who I am or what my culture is based upon my skin color because you don't know that.
You don't know that about anybody except for yourself.
Stop asking me to project stereotypes and assumptions onto others based upon their skin color because I feel like that's what you ask me to do incessantly over and over again for the past three years.
And I'm not going to do that.
Pretty great.
And listen to her.
It's so simple.
I'm just not going to do that.
I just, I refuse.
This is one of the ways forward.
A lot of us have been talking about what is the way forward when you're, when you're, Corporation pushes you like this to judge everybody based on pigmentation.
Well, Jody Shaw says the answer is I'm not going to do that.
I love that.
She went on to say, look, we have the right to work in an environment that is free from the ever present terror that any unverified student allegation of racism or any other ism might crush our reputation, ruin our lives, and even endanger us or our family members.
And so I kind of been thinking for a while that sort of using the law to protect these discussions, then people's right.
To not be judged based on skin color might be the way forward in this ridiculous cancel culture and shaming of people based on pigmentation.
And I think Jody Shaw is on the right.
Track.
So she's a devil-may-care all-star for a reason.
Okay, joining me now, Crystal Ball and Sagar and Jetty of the Hills Rising.
Great to have you here this morning, guys.
Thank you for coming.
Oh, it's our pleasure, as always, Megan.
It's good to see you, Megan.
So, OMG.
I mean, it's pretty much my full analysis.
That's it.
Right?
It's like it was a nail-biter.
It's still ongoing.
I'd love to start with just where you think we are right now and how this likely shakes out.
Can I?
I usually start with Crystal, but so as not to be a sexist pick, I'm going to start with you, Sagar.
You go.
Well, Megan, it's 10 39 a.m. here on the East Coast as you and I are talking.
Latino Overperformance Analysis 00:14:18
Right now, it looks like there are enough votes for Biden to pull it out with extraordinarily small margins in Michigan and in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and in Arizona.
And he would actually only need to win Michigan and Wisconsin and Arizona in order to eke out the Electoral College victory if Georgia also comes in with the small margin as well.
But there's a lot of lessons to be learned here.
I mean, the Latino overperformance for Donald Trump is nothing short of astounding.
And something Crystal and I have been laughing about all day is that the only group that Trump underperformed with last night was white men.
He overperformed amongst black men, black women, Latino men, Latino women, and white women.
I mean, could you find an MSNBC analyst who would have predicted that one?
It totally ruins the narrative.
Yeah, it's incredible.
I mean, Something I'm personally obsessed with is this Zapata County down in Texas.
I'm from Texas, and this is in the Rio Grande Valley, a 95% Hispanic district that Hillary won 65 to 32 last time.
Trump won that county by 52% of the vote this time around.
I never in my lifetime thought that I would see something like that happen.
He also won 47% of the vote in Star County, similar nearby in the Rio Grande Valley, 95% Hispanic, one of the poorest districts in the entire country.
Country and a section with a new border wall.
So, again, these are just things which fly completely to the narrative that the media has presented here.
But, Sagar, I was told that the reason he won with Hispanics, Latinas, Latinos in Florida is because they were all Cuban Americans, who, by the way, MSNBC explained to me last night are actually white and you're not allowed to refer to them as Hispanics when they vote for President Trump.
That's pretty much the exception to being a Hispanic.
You lose your right to say you are one.
But These are not Cuban Americans you're talking about in these Texas counties.
No, not at all.
These are some third, fourth, fifth generation Hispanic Americans.
Many of them even identify as white Hispanic.
Again, these are things which nobody in the mainstream media is capable of really understanding.
But there's complex dynamics, which is that people do not vote in monolith groups.
They are motivated by different issue areas.
And the overall bet that they were just going to come in because of quote unquote norms or going back to normal and more was a dramatic miscalculation.
By the Biden campaign.
Now, look, it worked out for him in Arizona.
We have to be honest here.
It did work out for him in Arizona, largely, I think, because they spent a decent amount of money in that state.
But they wrote off, or they wanted to take for granted Texas Latinos last night, and they dramatically made a mistake.
They had a good get out the vote.
The Democrats had a good get out the vote effort in Arizona.
Can I just tell you, as of right now, the Trump team is saying that they're going to win Pennsylvania, that they're confident.
And he is ahead a lot in Pennsylvania right now.
they still have to count all the mail-in votes, which they weren't allowed to count until yesterday, starting yesterday.
So the Trump team still thinks he's going to win Pennsylvania, but of course that isn't ballgame because since he lost Arizona, or so it appears, he's got to win Michigan.
He's got to win Michigan.
And the Trump campaign is saying that they believe they will win Georgia.
He needs that too.
They believe they're going to win Michigan.
They believe they're going to win Nevada, which I don't know about that.
And they say they'll win all of those if we count all the legal ballots.
If we count all the legal ballots.
Now, I don't know exactly what that means, but Crystal, I will say I understand the legal issues they're going to go after in Pennsylvania because they extended the vote.
They've been already fighting that one out, saying you can't take mail in ballots that come after, that are postmarked on election day and that aren't read until after election day.
And they are doing that.
They lost that legal fight.
They had similar fights in other states that the U.S. Supreme Court said, we're not going to review that now.
But if this becomes a thing where we have a split between the states and so on, we might take it up.
We might.
And so, boy, that's the Hail Mary.
If somehow the Trump team manages to cancel out the votes that were mailed on election day, but Not opened until after, oh my God, then this country is in for some sort of a hellhole week of brutal, bloody knuckle legal brawling.
Yeah.
And frankly, I don't think that that is likely to occur because, based on there isn't much of a legal ground to stand on in any of these states, maybe in Pennsylvania might be the one where there's the diciest questions.
But given that they lost Arizona, the fact that Biden has now come, now has a narrow lead in both Michigan and Wisconsin.
Wisconsin, that is expected only to expand.
I think it's a pretty tough landscape ultimately for President Trump.
I mean, look, the way I look at last night's results is it's sort of pathetic all the way around.
I mean, it's pathetic for Donald Trump, an incumbent president, to lose to Joe Biden, who's, let's just say, not at sort of the apex of his power and ability, who ran on very little other than, like, I'm going to wear a mask and not tweet mean stuff.
That's pathetic for an incumbent president to lose to such a lackluster message.
And it's pathetic for Joe Biden to so radically underperform.
In key, what Democrats have really taken for granted is this rising coalition of the Ascendant that they thought was just going to be with him no matter what.
And the fact that he so radically underperformed with some of these communities is pathetic on their front.
I really think a lot of the analysis after the fact is going to be look, it was close because this is a very divided country and it's a very divided electorate and people were polarized and it was what it was.
I don't buy that for one second.
Either one of these candidates could have notched a landslide victory.
If they actually offered an affirmative, clear, positive economic agenda for the country.
And the fact of the matter is, neither one of them did.
On Joe Biden and the Latino vote, this is something we've been talking about on Rising for months and months now.
Even back during the Democratic primary campaign, we would talk to the Sanders campaign and their chief advisor, Chuck Rocha, who really architected their strategy with the Latino community and said, look, it's not rocket science here.
First of all, you have to actually care and show up and spend the resources and start that conversation, something that the Biden campaign did not do.
And second of all, yeah, you're not going to get there just by throwing some diversity on the top of the ticket and thinking you can pander to identity and that that's going to be enough.
The Sanders campaign was extraordinarily popular with Latinos because why?
They focused on bread and butter issues, healthcare, wages, jobs, and it landed.
They invested the time and the money, and not one person from the Biden campaign bothered to reach out.
To Burning World to say, hey, how'd you pull this off and how might we do this again?
It's no mystery here why it was white suburban voters who were most enthusiastic about Joe Biden and who will ultimately, it looks Likely to give him the presidency.
It's because that's who they centered the entire campaign around.
This whole restore the soul of the nation or whatever the very sort of generic messaging they were putting out here.
Let's go back to normal.
That was all aimed squarely at white suburbanites and it landed with the target population and ignored broad swaths of the country.
I mean, what we didn't see last night was a complete repudiation of the hideous, awful, bigoted, racist, xenophobic, sexist Trump.
We did not see that.
And that's even the Democrats that I was listening to last night were.
Lamenting that.
You know, I think Rachel Maddow was out there saying there's been no blue wave.
There hasn't even been a ripple.
And a lot of Democrats were upset because they wanted to see him done.
They wanted to see the stiletto heel squishing him into the dirt.
And what we saw instead was he did incredibly well with Hispanics, improving his margins markedly from 2016.
He did well with the black voters.
Charles Blow was tweeting out today how black men are in greater and greater numbers voting for the Republican candidate.
It was 5% for McCain.
It was 11% for Romney.
It was 13% for Donald Trump at 16, 18% for Donald Trump in 2020, going up after being told for four years that he hates black people.
He loves white supremacists.
He praised Klansmen.
And on and on it went.
The latest ex-apol actually just showed that with the LGBT community, too, he got 20% of them, which is double what he got in 16.
I mean, my takeaway from that is: oh, by the way, Charles Blow, notwithstanding that 18% of the black men voted for Trump, his takeaway last night was, We are surrounded by racists.
That's actually his takeaway to this morning.
We are surrounded by racists.
So, to me, you tell me, I think this incessant focus by the Democrats on identity and name calling and dismissal of anybody's personhood because they, whatever, you know, they said something about whatever issue that the Democrats didn't like.
And in Trump, there's a long list.
It's done.
It didn't work.
It was rejected.
If I could just pick up on this point, because this is something I've been saying for a while.
When Kamala Harris was put on the Democratic ticket, what did the media tell us?
They said, Oh, this is going to drive up the numbers with young voters and with minority voters in particular.
Why?
Not because of her policy stances, not because of what she might do as vice president, simply based on her identity.
Now, not only was there zero basis for that belief, but there was actually negative evidence for that view.
You might recall, Kamala Harris ran in the Democratic primary and she did not do particularly well.
With any of those demographics.
That's why she wasn't the Democratic nominee.
So I would be hopeful that somebody in the Democratic Party would look at this and say, look, these hollow identity politics, divorced from any policy whatsoever and what it means for your life, is completely dead and broken.
Do I think they're actually going to do that?
No, I do not.
Because ultimately, look again, and I don't want to, you know, I don't want to oversell Trump's performance or undersell Biden's.
Ultimately, I think Biden is going to be the next president.
And weeks from now, Democrats are going to look at this and go, well, that was nerve wracking, but we got to win.
So they're going to forget any potential lessons that they should learn here.
But make no mistake, if you base a party just around college educated voters, this is a country where two thirds of Americans do not go to college.
How are those numbers going to work out for you ultimately down the road if you allow this realignment to continue to occur?
And I also want to say there's nothing as Democrats are learning, Republicans also need to keep in mind.
There is nothing set in stone about the way that these coalitions are moving.
Working class voters of all different races could come back home to the Democratic Party.
Could continue to drift over to the Republican Party.
This isn't static and it's not set and you can't take people for granted.
To me, that is the bottom line above all else.
Sagar, for Republicans out there who are feeling dejected that Trump may have lost this thing, there is some good news when it comes to the Senate because we would have been looking at a very different landscape if the Democrats had won the Senate, the White House, and increased their margin in the House.
They actually, the Republicans increased their margin in the House.
Yet another thing, the pollsters completely blew.
And the Senate races are interesting to me because if you look at the numbers, the Republicans got killed on spending in the Senate races.
The Democrats spent $726 million to the GOP's $423 million.
They were projected, of course, to lose, right, by all the know it all pollsters.
You look at some of the outstanding races this morning Susan Collins in Maine, who everybody said was done, she's up 51 to 42 percent over her challenger.
And most prognosticators this morning are saying, The Republicans are going to hold the Senate, and we're going to have four years of divided government.
So, what does that look like?
It's incredible.
I mean, Chuck Schumer, I don't even know how he must be feeling today.
Just to give it this perspective, they spent a collective $200 million to lose by a combined 35 points to Lindsey Graham and Mitch McConnell.
What kind of money allocation is that?
It just goes to show how much dumb money chased dumb polling.
I mean, we were told Jamie Harrison was tied.
With Lindsey Graham.
He lost by 17 points.
That's the exact same margin that the previous challenger to Lindsey Graham, who was a little known state senator, lost by.
That's just incredible.
So $100 million basically made zero difference whatsoever.
And it's the same story across the entire GOP Senate.
Cal Cunningham underperforming relative to Tom Till.
Tom Till is actually outperforming President Trump in North Carolina.
That is something nobody thought was going to do.
Susan Collins is the same story.
I mean, she was supposed to be.
You know, dead woman walking, and now it looks like she could be walking right into the chairman of the appropriations committee in the Senate.
It's, it's again incredible to see.
I think that the wins in the Senate and the down ballot wins are just again this kind of dramatic realignment.
I saw, you know, Hispanic, these Hispanic districts, and more pro GOP Hispanic voters and others winning all across the state of Texas in some of these house races.
Will Hurd's seat was picked up by a Republican that wasn't necessarily something that was in the card.
So Overall, the down ballot story is just as interesting as the presidential race.
And if anything, the polling miss was even bigger this time around.
I saw you tweeting today about how wrong the pollsters got it.
And you were just, you sounded fired up about just how misled we were.
And Trafalgar didn't get it all right either.
Mail-In Ballot Positions 00:09:47
He thought Trump was going to win.
But at least he had it more right in that he accounted for the shy Trump voter and tried to understand flyover country and Republican voters in a way it does not appear the mainstream pollsters did.
Yeah, I'm really furious about it.
I mean, we place a significant amount of trust in these companies and in these pollsters and hundreds of millions of dollars that the news organization spent.
And look, I mean, Wisconsin was supposedly told to us by ABC News was plus 17 points.
17 points.
That's ludicrous.
I mean, it's barely within a one point, it's a 20,000 vote margin, which is exactly what it was in 2016.
Except this time around, it looks like Joe Biden is doing a little bit better.
And so, in terms of the polling industry, I am just beginning, and I said this today on our show, which is that I do not think it is possible in order to poll properly with a figure like Donald Trump.
And I would conversely say somebody like Bernie Sanders, these people who just do not track onto the traditional political system.
Who excite various different types of voters who are not necessarily baked in, and that pollsters have actually gotten lucky just because of how standardized our politics have been over the last 30 years.
And that when Trump came along, he realigned the parties, but he also realigned the way that we're going to have to think about polling.
I'm never going to look at it the same again after this election.
No, me neither.
I mean, we were told for so many years, trust the polls, trust the polls, and they did tend to be right.
And then came Trump, and everything has changed.
No one's figured out how to do it.
And now we'll be equally confused four years from now because no matter what.
Happens over the next few days about Trump v. Biden.
Trump's not going to be on the ballot.
I don't think.
I guess if he loses, if he officially loses this one, I suppose he could come back.
But anyway, we don't know how they're going to be able to poll future Republican candidates or whether the Democrats will just try to make every future Republican a Trump.
Remember, they tried to tell us Mitt Romney was a sexist pig because he said binders full of women, which was just an attempt to say, I have binders full of resumes from women.
And from that, they spent weeks saying he was a sexist jerk.
Who couldn't be elected.
All right, let me ask you a quick question, though, because everyone who's been on the show is saying the same thing, which is it doesn't look good for Trump.
But I do want to spend just one minute on Michigan because it was weird.
Because if Trump, I think he looks good in Pennsylvania.
And if he could win Michigan and hold Georgia and, yeah, just Georgia and North Carolina, he could still win.
And he looks good in North Carolina, too.
So it's really, to me, it's about Michigan and Pennsylvania.
But Michigan, He was up in Michigan last night.
He had 2.2 million and Joe Biden had 1.99 million, just rounding.
And then, like, in an instant, all these new votes came in and Biden went up to 2.13 million.
And Trump stayed exactly the same.
So a bunch of new votes came in and every single vote went for Joe Biden.
And it's not just a conspiracy theory with like crazies on the right saying, ah, legitimate folks today are saying, we need to ask some questions about how that happened.
Michigan is too important to ignore.
What we saw with the vote there.
Any thoughts on it?
I mean, what we saw is Detroit coming in and coming in in a way that was overwhelmingly for Joe Biden and fairly consistent with past trends.
So I didn't see anything suspect in the data that was coming in.
And in fact, look, one of the things that we try to prepare people for on our show was specifically in the states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, that it was very likely because of the nature of how they count their ballots that you would see a very strong.
Trump early vote because those are the election day votes, which we knew in person was likely to be more GOP, and that that would reverse over time as the mail in ballots were counted.
And that's exactly what we're seeing in Wisconsin.
It's what we're seeing in Michigan.
And, you know, I'm not the super number cruncher, but based on the analysis that I've seen, I actually think Biden is in a fairly decent position to ultimately win Pennsylvania based on what is still out and what he's been performing in the mail in ballot so far.
So we'll see on that one.
But, you know, with Arizona in the bag, he ultimately doesn't have to get.
Pennsylvania.
And he's also got a good shot, even maybe perhaps favored in Georgia because of a significant chunk of the Atlanta vote is still out and still remains to be counted.
So I think that's what the landscape looks like.
And I didn't see anything suspect or suspicious in the way that the votes came in ultimately.
Yeah, I think that's certainly.
So what do you think happens now, Sagar?
What happens now if this week plays out and there's, you know, the legal challenges may go, but there's going to be some decisive information coming out of.
At least a couple of these states that should tell us what's going on.
What happens next?
I just saw the Biden campaign manager say that Jen O'Malley Dillon said that they expect to hear from the former vice president sometime later today and that they fully expect that he will be the clear winner as president by this afternoon.
So that's what they're saying publicly.
That's quite a declarative statement.
Obviously, the Trump campaign is throwing some water on that.
However, I would say there is no instant recount in Wisconsin as they are trying to claim here.
It's essentially the same margin that Trump won last time around, and there wasn't a recount then.
It's going to be the same story, I think, in Michigan and Pennsylvania.
I think we're not going to know Pennsylvania for two days.
But if Biden does begin to take the lead there in the mail in ballots, then I do think it is game over.
In terms of an actual concession, I think we're probably a week or so away from that because there's going to be exhaustive last minute efforts.
And look, it's just true.
Joe Biden did not run away with this election, he put himself in a precarious situation.
I don't doubt the Trump campaign, the GOP is going to fight like hell for it.
But right now, I think they're the underdogs.
And, Crystal, what happens as you cleverly phrased it if Joe Biden ascends to the presidency while, quote, not at the apex of his power and ability?
That's so gentle.
You're very diplomatic.
What happens?
I mean, I think a lot of us are looking at him thinking, can he do this?
Is he up to the job?
Are we really about to swear in President Kamala Harris?
I mean, here's the reality, Megan.
The Biden campaign promised next to nothing in this campaign.
As I said, he promised to wear a mask, beat Donald Trump, wear a mask, and not send mean tweets.
I think you will 100% be able to live up to those modest expectations.
And look, a lot of the analysis is like, oh my God, this is so bad for Joe Biden that he's going to have a Republican Senate, likely.
Those are not certain yet, but looks likely that it'll be a Republican Senate.
I don't see it that way.
He ran on a pledge to not fundamentally transform anything.
And now he's got the perfect excuse.
The mean Republicans are keeping him.
Blocking him from being able to do anything of significance.
And there's nothing Democrats love better than a good excuse for their utter impotence and inability to actually affect meaningful change.
So I think it's a pretty good setup for him and a relatively depressing one for anyone who's looking for some significant reform, wages lifted, better health care, or any of the sort of, you know, the issues that really do unite Americans across partisan race and gender lines, geographic lines, education lines, et cetera.
Well, I'm sure a lot of Republicans just heaved a sigh of relief in response to utter impotence for the next four years.
I'm sure they're not looking for big government action if Biden takes over.
You guys, such thoughtful analysis.
Love hearing from you.
Thank you so much for coming on.
Thanks, Megan.
Our pleasure, Megan.
Wow.
Gosh, what a situation, right?
It's like we're going to have real answers soon, but we know a lot more right now than we did this time yesterday.
And, you know, we're just trying to call it straight for you, not putting a thumb on the scale, just trying to call it like we see it with the data coming in.
and assess what it means.
Assess what it means, not just for the outcome, but for the country.
I personally like divided government.
I've always liked divided government.
I think Americans like divided government.
I think they usually correct it if it goes single party for too long.
Because you do see sweeping changes that can be a little scary.
That's how we got Obamacare.
People were like, whoa, what did we do?
Wait a minute.
And they bounced all those Democrats out two years later and the Republicans took control and undid some stuff.
So we're going to know more.
I just think, hold on, because the thing I want to tell everybody today is the same thing I wanted to tell them four years ago.
We're fine.
No matter who actually won this, whether it's Biden or Trump, we're fine.
Thankfully, our lawmakers don't have that much power over us.
They really don't.
They definitely touch our lives in some ways.
But I think more and more in this country, we are leaning toward private industry and toward individual responsibility and decision making.
And there's been a collective effort, at least on the right, to squeeze government out of our lives as much as we could over the past 10, 15, 20 years.
And, you know, you're responsible for you.
There's very little that Joe Biden directly can do to affect your life.
And same with Donald Trump.
Now, we did see some things under Trump, of course.
But the country's fine and will remain fine no matter what the final tally is on these votes.
Look, one thing you might not be fine on just around back is your cybersecurity.
Was that a smooth transition?
No.
Okay, I'm still figuring it out.
No BS and Collective Effort 00:01:00
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We will be back later this week with more analysis and hopefully more results.
Thanks for listening to The Megan Kelly Show.
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