The 2024 U.S. election saw Trump’s near-identical 75M+ vote total to 2020, while Harris trailed Biden by 10–11M votes, with Arizona’s razor-thin margin leaving the popular vote deficit intact. Polls ignored non-voters—especially Gen Z—and skewed results, as Polymarket’s sudden betting shifts suggested manipulation over voter sentiment. Celebrity endorsements backfired, and Israel-Gaza protests failed to mobilize Democrats, while economic frustration masked deeper racism or sexism, per Princeton professor Edward S. Glaude Jr. Despite Harris’s logical nomination, her identity and perceived lack of progressive alignment may have hindered support, leaving the hosts concluding America’s future is bleak amid disinformation and declining accountability. [Automatically generated summary]
And we're back with Truth Unrestricted, the podcast that desperately wants a do-over.
So we recorded this episode that you're about to hear Friday, November the 8th, just a few days after the election.
Some numbers that we quote in that episode have been updated since then.
I'm not going to give a full ream of it now.
They're slightly different and may still change a little bit since then, but more or less everything that we calculated based on it is still unchanged, mostly.
So I'm not going to go through and try to do the messy thing of redoing it or changing anything up.
It's what we were feeling at the time based on what we knew.
And that's the way it is.
Sorry for the delay.
And the episode.
And we're back with Truth Unrestricted, the podcast that is not ready for whatever happens next.
So, yeah.
Before we start, if anyone has any questions, comments, complaints, concerns, you can send that email to truthunrestricted at gmail.com.
And with that, we're going to get right into this.
We've got a lot to do today.
We want to talk about the U.S. election.
It just happened a couple days ago.
I don't know that we want to talk about it.
We have to.
Yes.
We feel obligated to ourselves to do this.
We did all those election updates on the way to the election.
And then now what would happen if we just didn't ever mention it again?
Just pretended like it never happened.
Just go on talking about every other topic and pretend that.
Yeah.
I would like to pretend that it never happened.
You know, there's that show all of a sudden, I'm forgetting the name of the show.
It's a show on Macs, I believe, or HBO, something like that, where people have their brains split.
Severed.
I think it's actually on Apple TV.
Is it Apple?
I think it's Apple TV.
That part's been severed in my brain.
It's been so long between season one and waiting for season two.
But, you know, if we can find that technology and sever off the part of my brain that remembers what has happened in the election, just for a few hours a day.
Yeah.
I'd be happy with that.
So another thing we're going to do differently in this episode is that we have a general rule that we don't follow completely 100% that we don't swear on the podcast.
It's a weird rule.
A lot of people think it's weird.
I originally imagined that there might be some people that I might actually know that listen to this podcast driving their, well, you know, driving their kids to school and whatnot.
Maybe they maybe they do that.
Maybe they don't.
I don't know.
But if you're listening to this and you don't want whoever else is listening to it with you to listen to that kind of content, we are going to that's what today is going to be like.
There's going to be there's going to be curse words.
That's how it turned out.
Sorry, not sorry.
Listen that another time, maybe.
I don't know.
So how'd that fucking election go for you, David?
Yeah.
Pretty fucking terrible.
Pretty fucking terrible.
Yeah.
I mean, yeah, there was a lot going on there.
You know, I think I said in one of the election updates, I was really getting annoyed with the liberal Twitter accounts who were saying, Ignore the polls, ignore the polls, ignore the polls.
And then a poll favoring Harris would come out and they'd be like, Look at what this poll says, look at what this poll says.
And then, you know, since our last one, they flipped back to ignore the polls, ignore the polls.
And then there was that one last poll in Iowa that was done by someone that expected only polls in Iowa and apparently is very, yeah, very expected there for that.
Yeah, right.
Immediately, all those same accounts were like, look at this poll.
This proves, you know, that this is the way we're trending.
Yeah.
And, you know, I had been, if we had been doing like weekly election updates, you, you know, you would have been able to see me go through, you know, various cycles.
I had been feeling pretty down about it.
And then I just, you know, started feeling better.
Part of it was denial.
Yeah.
I didn't want to admit that a majority of the U.S., whether electoral or as it turns out, popular, could vote for that scum-sucking traitor.
Fair.
But especially after like his Madison Square Garden rally, where he literally, well, not he, his opening acts literally called Puerto Rico trash, attacked Jews, attacked blacks, attacked, you know, anybody that wasn't a straight white man, basically.
And they were like, ah, he's a roast comedian.
Yeah, but how do you bring a roast comedian to a political rally?
Right.
And also, if Trump's strange choice.
Yeah, if Trump didn't agree with it, all Trump had to say was, yeah, sorry.
But then they all, it also came out that he was going to make another comment that the Trump administration or the Trump administration, the Trump campaign told him to cut.
So it wasn't like they didn't know what he was going to say.
They knew and they were okay with it.
And so it's like, well, certainly that's going to impact things.
And then even though I say don't listen to those liberal accounts, you know, like I said, this denial, the denial in me was strong, and I started to feel a little hopeful.
I started to allow myself.
As a matter of fact, I was so hopeful.
I thought it might be over Tuesday night that it would just be so clear that even Trump wouldn't be able to argue his way out of it.
And I was half right.
It was over Tuesday night.
Yeah.
Or technically, I guess Wednesday morning, because I went to bed Tuesday night, still with the slim, slim hope that something could change because the purple states hadn't been called yet.
And then I woke up in the morning, looked at my phone, and they were all red instead of purple.
Yeah, there's a sense that I get that seems odd to me because I have a strange relationship with the social atmosphere around me that I suspect other people feel,
but they don't notice that something about Something about voting is related to confidence that others will vote with you.
Like, like something about it is related to this idea that in order to convince people to vote for Kamala Harris, they would need to have the sense that other people would be voting for Kamala Harris.
And the same thing was true for Trump, that in order for people to get the sense that they should vote for Trump, they would have to get the sense that other people were already enthusiastically supporting Trump, which is why the size of a rally matters somehow.
Yeah, but who endorses you matters, right?
I mean, if that were true, Harris would have won.
I mean, that's all.
Well, that's what I mean is that, is that, you know, but that sense is weird, isn't it?
That, that to convince people to vote, you need to convince them that other people are going to vote for that person.
Almost as if you're sitting in a trench.
It's World War I.
And you say, we are going to leave this safe trench and go assault the other trench that's across this, you know, deadly barrier of barbed wire and everything else.
And I assure everyone in this trench that when everyone, you know, you don't need to hesitate because everyone else will absolutely be there with you when you go.
Yeah.
And everything will be fine once we all go at once and assault the other trench, right?
Like it's almost that sense that no one wants to be the only one who voted for someone somehow weirdly.
And I don't like I've never taken any kind of poly sci course and I don't even like the fact that we call them political scientists because as I've said in this podcast, they're not scientists.
They're political engineers at the very best.
You know, they're not forming hypotheses and then testing those hypotheses against objective reality that that's not what they're doing.
It's not even close to what they're doing.
Silly to call them scientists of any sort.
It distorts the entire milieu of science.
But there's something about this that seems weird to me why we think that's the case, why people get a sense that, you know, because there was a lot of people at the rallies that she's going to necessarily win.
I don't, you know, how do we get that?
Where does that come from?
Why do we think that's a thing?
I wondered that the whole time.
And by the way, I did want to quote one political scientist.
He was a survivor contestant.
And he could have won, but they realized he could have won and voted him out.
Jesse Lopez.
He tweeted.
He doesn't tweet often, but he tweeted, I have a PhD in political science.
Here's my understanding of last night's election outcome informed by reading decades of rigorously conducted research on American politics.
People really fucking suck.
Succinct.
Should have had him as an extra guest on this podcast.
Well, yeah.
You know, as far as the rallies, I thought the same thing.
They're focusing on these rallies, but the thing about rallies is, okay, great.
You filled a 50,000 seat arena.
That proves that 50,000 people will vote.
Yeah, it's not enough.
It doesn't prove anything else.
Yeah.
You know, and the fact that Trump's rallies, people got bored, people left, they weren't as big.
You know, the week leading up to it, they showed, there was one that I even retweeted.
It said, zoom in on the people behind him.
And every single person was looking down at their phone or bored or whatever.
Yeah.
They've heard it all before.
They were there showing support, even though they were bored.
Yeah.
The board voters vote counts just as much as the excited voters vote, it's right.
So I have some tough love here and we need to.
We need to do this.
Uh, the cope needs to go away.
Like never going to right, but it needs to.
It really does so.
For example, the Guardian wrote an article eight months ago saying that 154 scholars graded the U.S. presidents in order of greatness and Trump came up dead last.
Yeah, not surprising.
Right.
And some person is now retreating this, retweeting this today for some reason, like it matters somehow.
You know, there's something wrong with the people who do this, I think.
It doesn't matter what 154 scholars say, even if they were all U.S. citizens, which isn't even necessarily true.
I don't know what the 154 scholars were.
Presumably they were, you know, scholars of American history and likely all American citizens, even if they all voted for Kamala Harris over Trump.
That's only 154 votes.
It doesn't matter what they said eight months ago about Trump.
That doesn't matter at all.
The U.S. electorate decided that Trump would be better than Kamala.
That's the only thing that matters right now.
Yeah.
I mean, it didn't matter that however many, I mean, I could pull these specific figures, but we've all heard them.
However many economists, no, every Nobel winning economist said, and maybe it wasn't every, but a large number said Trump's plan would cause raging inflation and Kamala's plan was better.
His own alma mater released a report saying his plan was terrible.
All these things, and we'll get to this later.
I have more to say on the economic stuff, but it didn't matter.
Yeah.
And it also doesn't matter if it will turn out to be worse.
You know what I mean?
It doesn't matter if he enacts these things because he could, he's a liar about so many things.
He might never have had any thought and might go into this and never do any tariffs that are terrible.
Like it, you know, he's already going back on so many things.
He's already looks like he's forgotten who RFK Jr. was.
And that's great.
I think that's awesome.
I think that he should forget who RFK Jr. is right away.
That would be the best thing that he could do right now is just RFK who.
But, you know, that doesn't matter.
None of that matters.
What matters is that he was elected now.
And you can try to say, if only we had zigged instead of zagged at some point.
Yeah, maybe.
That only matters if it teaches us something for what to do in the future, right?
Yeah.
And there are some who say it does and some who say it doesn't, but I'll show sure we'll get to.
You know, what's going to happen this time?
I don't know.
You know, former Speaker Kevin McCarthy said in an interview that he would be, that Trump would be, quote, different this time because he can't run for reelection and he knows the job.
My immediate response was, yeah, he'll be different.
He'll be worse.
I mean, if you don't need to run for reelection, you can do whatever the hell you please, especially since the Supreme Court has said you can literally do whatever the hell you please.
It's just got to be part of your official acts, which what the hell does that mean?
You just say it's an official act before you do everything?
You do, yeah.
And what's this BS about knowing the job?
He still in his speeches hasn't shown that he understands it.
He's shown no understanding.
And McCarthy also said, remember, we're America.
We don't have dictators.
We have different branches of government.
So we have a check and balance system.
Yeah, that's a great theory, which only works if the other branches are willing to check and balance it.
And so far, the Supreme Court, like I just said, they've given him almost unlimited powers.
And Congress, they were barely willing to check him before.
They didn't check.
I mean, when he was a private citizen running for office, he still had control over them and what bills they would pass.
And now they're going to look at him and say, even if I don't really like him, he has the power to destroy me.
So I am on board because he won the election again, even after everyone said he wouldn't.
And if I go against him, he is going to run someone against me in the next primary, and I will lose.
Yeah.
Well, they're going to have to come to terms with the fact that there is going to have to be another primary for them to lose in order to worry about that.
I just need to let my dog out.
She's at the door.
She's looking under the door.
Yeah.
Just one second.
All right.
There you go.
you go there we go okay so i think we got the uh feelings part of this out of the way unless there's any other feelings you want to get out before we no i have i have a few quick predictions Okay.
Yeah.
I think that the Senate is going to remove the filibuster.
Okay.
I think that, you know, Democrats have always been like, no, we can't remove the filibuster for these important issues because then it would let, you know, it would give the go-ahead for Republicans to do that.
Republicans don't care.
They really don't.
No.
We've seen that with Supreme Court justices.
You know, they'll be like, they make up their own rules.
I think Trump will crash the economy one way or the other.
Great.
Looking forward to it.
Because the Canadian economy will go right along with it.
It's tied to it so strongly, there's no changing it.
Yeah.
I think Trump will not be president by the end of this four-year term, one way or another.
I do not think.
Now, mind you, I have to admit, I've made a $50 bet with a friend of mine that he wouldn't make it through his first term.
And to be fair, he did get impeached twice.
The Senate was just too chicken shit to actually convict him.
And I don't think that they ever expected what would happen.
I think they were like, oh, he could be tried in the criminal courts.
Oh, he'll never be elected.
We won't have to worry about him again.
And then, yeah, here they are.
But I really do think between what we've seen of his health and his mind, I think, yeah, I think give it a couple years and Vance will 25th Amendment him due to health or dementia.
And I think Vance will have the support of, you know, the billionaires.
And we will have President Vance by the end of four years.
Those are strong predictions.
And now they're locked in on the record.
One more.
Okay.
COVID deaths will increase as the vaccine is further undercut.
Okay.
Now.
I'm not comfortable with any of those.
I don't want anyone to think that my nonchalance is to be interpreted as not giving a shit about the plight of the American people.
But I think those are predictions that could easily happen, unfortunately.
So in the meantime, we're going to move on.
We want to talk more directly about what specifically went wrong.
Now, immediately, half the people listening to this want to just turn it right off because a lot of people have, this is all anyone's been talking about who has been anywhere near the left side of the political spectrum since it happened.
What do we know?
The ninth?
Three whole days?
It's felt like five months of this talk already.
But we're going to do it anyway.
We're swearing and it's amazed we're not drinking, actually.
Yes.
Yeah, I should have been.
Well, I quit drinking last year.
So hopefully I stick with that.
But who knows?
I did some drinking, you know, not much, but a little bit, you know, the first couple of days.
Before we go into our thoughts on this, let me just say, hopefully before anyone has turned it off, we don't know the answer.
No, nobody knows the answer.
We don't know any of these answers.
We could be wrong about all of them.
There's going to be a lot of analysis.
Yeah.
And it's going to take time, years.
Some of it's already coming out and people are already, but there are people already saying this is the reason.
And they are very certain of themselves.
Yeah.
And they don't know the answer.
And they are full of shit.
Okay.
The people on the far left are claiming in very strong terms that the Democrats didn't cater to them.
And that's why they lost.
And the moderates are claiming very strongly that they catered too much to the far left.
And that's why they lost.
It obviously can't be both.
Both of them are very, very sure.
It is the biggest example of confirmation bias I have seen in a long time.
And everyone really needs to take a breath rather than attacking each other.
But no, they're going right at each other.
They're both very sure they're correct.
It's almost like they had their minds made up before the results even came through.
A perfect example.
So I saw someone retweet Journey Searles.
I know nothing about this person.
I knew nothing until I saw the retweet.
But I gather she is very far left.
She was replying to something that Louise Jordan, a more moderate Democrat, said on NBC.
She said, the progressive era has to end if Democrats want to win again.
And then, so Journey's response was, actually, the numbers revealed that a lot of registered Democrats just didn't vote this year, which suggests Kamala's campaign wasn't progressive enough to inspire them to support her.
This is the biggest damn logical leap I've seen in a long time.
They suggest just saying the numbers were lower doesn't automatically mean it must be that she wasn't progressive enough.
How can you say maybe she was too progressive?
Or any number of reasons.
Maybe it was raining that day.
You know, I mean, to just say not as many Democrats voted, therefore she wasn't progressive enough.
That's there is literally, there's no logical connection there whatsoever.
And they're treating it like it is truth from on high.
Yeah, and I think everyone needs to take the people who say this with a grain of salt, who are who are very, very certain this early with a grain of salt.
So maybe this is a time to kind of get into some of the details on the results for real.
So there's still a little bit of counting happening.
It's still the last few trickling in, but it's not like a large number of results trickling in.
It's just a little bit here and there, and there's some recounts and there's a couple of numbers changing.
Okay.
Yes.
However, it's not like early on where people were like, oh my God, there's after like 20 votes missing.
Missing votes.
And all of a sudden it became the new Trump assassination was staged conspiracy promoted by many of those same people and even additional people.
So yeah, the liberal conspiracists are really pissing me off even more than usual.
Yeah, yeah, we're going to get into them.
But first of all, these are straight up numbers.
So this is presidential results as of today from the Associated Press.
I don't care about the electoral numbers.
Everyone knows that Trump has more electoral numbers.
But the most surprising thing about this election to me is that, you know, Democrats don't get to console themselves anymore about the idea that Republicans would never win if there was no electoral college because Donald Trump has is considerably higher than Kamala Harris's total in total votes.
And so here's the real numbers as of now, and they could be a little bit different, but as the days go on, the amount of change is not going to matter much.
So in 2020, Donald Trump, I have it right here, Donald Trump got 74,224,319 votes.
Okay.
As of the latest information I have right now on the presidential race, he has now 74,537,291 votes.
So a couple hundred thousand more, almost the same number of total votes for Trump.
All right.
So Joe Biden in 2020 got 81,284,666 votes.
So Kamala Harris, as of now, 70,776,928 votes.
So the only state that's still too close to call is Arizona.
And I think it's going to be called for Trump.
They're still working out the exact thing, but I think he's ahead enough by now on this information I have here.
It's not completely called yet, but I think it will be.
And there aren't enough votes in Arizona to change that number by any staggering degree.
Certainly not by to put Kamala over the top for the the popular vote.
Yeah.
But it does mean that Trump is nearly exactly the amount of popularity he had in 2020.
And Kamala Harris is about 10 to 11 million votes behind what Joe Biden had in 2020.
So for total number of votes, unless there's still after four days, another 10 million votes still waiting to come in.
which at this point, if that's true, then why are they calling it even?
I don't know.
But, and they're all for Kamala.
This is, this is legitimately 10 million fewer votes for Kamala Harris than there was for Biden.
So something happened.
We don't know what.
And I don't think we're going to, you know, in all the things we're going to go over today, I don't think we're going to discover what.
But something happened.
And it is a lower turnout.
Like some people are saying it's the same turnout.
That's not being shown by these numbers.
It's just not the same turnout.
Donald Trump's turnout was nearly identical.
The Democrat turnout is quite a bit lower.
So we start.
Now, whether that means literally lower Democrat turnout or whether it means votes for the Democratic ticket.
Right.
But whether it means, you know, independents tended to swing towards him and fewer people voted overall.
It's quite possible that the independents are the ones who had the lower vote.
I mean, they all might have, but that there were lower independent vote turnout, but those who did vote swung towards Trump instead of swinging towards the Democrats this time.
Yeah.
And I, you know, there's, I've seen some numbers for this about how in this election cycle in the U.S., there was a record number of new, newly registered voters.
And I saw a pie chart.
I don't have it right in front of me.
I'm not as prepared as I want to be.
I got these other numbers in front of me, but just not that one that I'm thinking of right now.
But it shows that, you know, something like 21 million people registered to vote in addition to the number that was registered to vote in the 2022 midterm elections or something.
And it said this percentage was Democrat, registered Democrat, and this percentage was registered Republican.
And this percentage was some much smaller percentage was independent.
And I thought to myself, why would you even be part of the Democrat or Republican party if you weren't registered to vote?
Like what, why are there any in the late stages of this registered Democrats or registered Republicans that haven't registered to vote for the presidential campaign?
Are we thinking these are new members of these each of these parties?
Like, what is happening here?
It depends.
It depends.
If they voted in the primary elections, then in most states, when you vote in the primary, you have to declare your party.
Yeah.
Okay.
Or you have to declare a party, at least for that election.
And so they could be getting it from that.
That would be the only way they can get it.
I had a discussion with a journalist on Twitter about Illinois for that reason, because one particular, it was a Republican cause was saying, look at these numbers that have come in.
And we're already seeing this.
And the journalist pointed out, well, Illinois is an open primary state.
You could be a Democrat one time and a Republican the next.
And I, you know, was responding to them and saying, yes, clearly this group interpreted Republican and Democrat the way they wanted to that most helped them send their message out.
But you could more objectively say, okay, either we look at the last election or you say we look at how they voted over the course of the last five elections because sometimes they'll like his point was during the last primary, a lot of people switched parties just to vote for or against a specific person in the other party.
And so, you know, to make sure that wasn't the case, you just look at the last five or whatever.
And so, you know, it could have been obviously the last five, it couldn't have been done this way, because like you said, if they're new voters.
But, you know, there's also the question, what does it mean additional people registered to vote?
You know, my sons moved to new states and registered to vote.
Are they being counted?
They were registered here in Illinois.
Now you're registered in two different states.
I mean, in those states, they are newly registered voters.
I don't know if that means that they count as newly registered voters or if someone took them off the rolls here in Illinois.
Yeah.
Also true is that there are a number of places where, you know, like Michigan, where you had a Senate seat up for election and Donald Trump won the state of Michigan, but the Senate seat went to Democrat.
And this happened in other states too, where you had congressional seats that went to Democrats, where the state itself went to Republican.
So it's mixed in a way that tells me that this isn't like people will say that they just somehow magically by some method inside a black box somewhere wave their hands and votes disappear.
That's where these extra, I mean, the difference between the Harris and Biden vote totals between these two elections was about 11 million and they just vanished as 11 million.
But they did it evenly across all these different states at the same time.
And which is the fact that it's not a federal election service that does this.
It's individual states that do it.
You would have to have infiltrated all 50 states or at least a good portion of them to flick this in this way, which is a remarkable amount.
Like, how do they think this is possible?
It's almost, you know, once you look at the details, it's almost all the same people that ran this election as who ran the 2020 election.
Oh, yeah.
It's just a flip of the same thing.
I mean, you know, Republicans were screaming vote, you know, voting cheats, election fraud, right up until the numbers started coming in.
And then they were like, oh, oh, yeah, never mind.
Yeah.
Clearly, it was their strategy to have to claim shenanigans.
And then they found out they didn't have to.
And then it was something, oh, this vote is solid.
Absolutely.
There's no shenanigans here.
This is a great result.
And yeah, of course.
Yeah.
I mean, we've been saying it for a long time.
It's only cheating when they lose.
Right.
Right.
But apparently we're maybe headed to a place where the Democrats or the people on the left feel that way too.
And that's.
I mean, some of them certainly do.
The more conspiratorial minded.
I was annoyed to see some of the bigger, like I said, some of the bigger accounts.
I don't necessarily follow them, but like a fairly big account, Brooklyn Dad Defiant was posting 20 million votes have disappeared.
Yeah.
He may have changed his tune.
I don't know.
Like I said, I don't follow him.
I just saw it retweeted.
Yeah.
And, you know, I saw some other ones as well.
And yeah, it's annoying.
It's more annoying, I think, when it's someone from, you know, who normally says things you agree with because it really undercuts the other things they say, much like, you know, we talked about with the whole quote unquote staged assassination attempt.
It's like some of these people say things that make sense most of the time.
And then they put that out there.
And you're like, oh my God, shut up.
You're an idiot.
Yeah, you're not looking at real data here.
You're going with your feelings.
And that's not how we should be deciding this stuff.
So also looking at some other numbers here, it appears that, I mean, there's a lot of people who go through and they break it down by demographics.
The most startling demographic change from 2020 to 2024, of course, everyone's talking about it is the shift in Hispanic or Latino voters.
It went more strongly for Trump this time.
Overall, more than 50% of them still voted for Harris this time, just fewer percentage of them, which, I mean, doesn't matter.
Enough of them voted for Trump that it tipped that direction.
But in almost every other category, in nearly every category, the total went away from Harris or away from the Democrat side and toward the Republican side, away from Harris toward Trump, as compared to the Biden-Harris campaign from 2020.
The age demographic of 18 to 29 that many people consider to be critical because there's so many people in that age category, that also shifted away from Democrats toward Republicans, echoing a thing.
And I don't know how often we should say I told you so in this podcast, Dave, because people find it annoying.
But I did say on this very podcast that we might have a problem with Gen Z voters, right?
I don't know how to say that gently, but I did say that, that in a TikTok generation where the thing that matters to them is popularity and the ability to turn heads, you know, absent any other concern, that's swaying some people.
And I mean, that almost goes back to A thing that we talked about earlier today about how to some people, the idea that they have to be assured that other people are also voting that way before they're confident voting that way, you know, it's almost like that, that popularity breeds popularity somehow in a way that I don't fully understand, but maybe is true.
Yeah, still more than half did vote for Biden Harris, which tells me that that's also a low voter turnout demographic still, because if that demographic really turned out in the same sort of numbers that the 65 plus group turned out in, percentage-wise, it would be over every time.
I mean, there are so many people in that age category, but they're still not showing up.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I don't know what to do about it, but it's a real result.
I mean, there's no denying those numbers.
And another thing that I think we should point out about like the polls were, you mentioned the polls, and the polls were saying all kinds of things.
They were saying that, you know, people were trying to pick the poll they liked.
And then, of course, there was some kind of thing about a betting market that U.S. citizens aren't supposed to bet on.
And I'm sure some of them still do through accounts or whatever that had Trump winning.
And then right near the end, it was veering toward even because there was so many people who caught on and were betting on the Democrat side.
I mean, I would have.
The way it spiked, I mean, the way it looked.
Yeah, it's the polymarket.
Now, I don't know a ton about it.
Okay.
But what I do know is it was it's by betting.
And so what it means is, first of all, it can be manipulated.
And it appeared that it was because there was a time when there was all of a sudden a huge spike for Trump and against Harris.
Yeah.
Even though there was no reason for it.
Well, the reason was a whole bunch of people dumped their money in there betting for Trump.
Now, were they betting for Trump because they really wanted to bet for Trump?
Or were they betting for Trump because they wanted the polymarket to jump?
So they could say, hey, look, polymarket is saying it's Trump.
Polymarket's always right.
Trump's going to win.
And therefore, kind of help push that narrative, which goes along with what you were saying before.
You know, more people, oh, they think he's going to win.
Well, then they'll help him win.
Then I think what happened was people saw that and went, oh, we don't think that's happening at all.
Those are pretty good odds.
We're going to get in on it.
Yeah.
And I think, and let me tell you, I looked into it.
I looked for a way to bet on the outcome.
Now, thankfully, I didn't because I would have lost money in addition to being pissed off.
But when you see that kind of, I don't want to call it an overlay, but an out-of-whack bet, you know, it's kind of like if your team, if your football team is, you think, well, you know, I think my team could win.
And then all of a sudden, a bunch of the other teams, people bet on their team to win and it pushes the odds so much in your favor that you're like, well, now I really have to bet on my team to win.
And that can happen.
So, I mean, I saw it.
I was watching my Illini, a football game.
And I looked on the ESPN odds, and they were supposed to win by, I don't know, three and a half points.
And then a few days later, I looked and the other team was supposed to win by one and a half points.
And I was like, well, that's weird.
Now that I can't bet on because in Illinois, sports bet is legal, except you can't bet on colleges in Illinois.
But I was like, huh, that's weird.
And, you know, what happened?
Well, I think a lot of people bet against Illinois or maybe for Illinois.
I don't know, whichever way, it swun that direction.
Yeah, the amount of money that bets on one side swings it in the other direction.
Yeah.
And so, so, yeah, I think that's what the polymarket was doing there.
And it was annoying that I just saw a very large liberal account I follow say, well, next time you'll believe the polymarket.
It ended up being right.
And I'm like, well, it ended up being right, but those huge swings it took, they made no sense.
You know, I mean, it was, it was a coin flip.
Everything was a coin flip by the end.
Well, until the result came in.
Well, right.
And at the point, the coins already flipped.
Yeah.
So I think there's something important to say about polls, about political polls, is that there's information that it will never show you.
And that information is who is not going to vote.
It's really never going to tell you that.
I mean, they always say their polls of likely voters.
So I think the first question they ask is, are you planning to vote?
But it's just, I mean, it's like anything else.
Are you planning to vote?
And who are you planning to vote for?
Right.
Sure.
So it tells you that as much as it can.
Yeah.
You know, I think that if you were going to construct a poll that was going to tell you what percentage of people were not going to show up to the polls, how could you possibly arrange that?
How could you possibly ask it in a way?
Yeah.
There's because no one's going to admit to that.
Oh, sure, they will.
Well, maybe some people would, maybe.
I mean, I think not even nearly the number that's real.
I mean, that's hard to say.
I haven't done polling.
I have done calls for other political reasons.
And some people have told me, no, I'm not voting.
Some people have told me I'm not voting for your candidate, even though they were Democrats and I was calling for a Democratic candidate.
You know, people will say it.
Whether they do it or not is another matter.
I mean, I was involved in, I helped a school board candidate.
She ended up losing by one vote.
What?
Turned out one of the precinct committeemans in her area didn't vote.
Now, you, you know, supporting what you said, if some pollster had said, are you going to vote?
Well, he's a precinct committeeman.
Of course he was going to say he was going to vote.
But he didn't.
And that was the difference between a tie vote and losing by one vote, which also flipped the school board from Democrat to Republican.
One single solitary vote.
But I think that in that case, like if you were going to try to learn that, what you would find is that people are much more likely to claim that they will be voting when they don't end up voting than they ever will to claim that they're not going to vote when they end up voting.
Yes.
Right.
So it's, it's a like if you're going to vote, like if you're asking people some question, maybe you are asking them if they're going to vote for a Democrat or Republican, you're going to imagine that some people are going to say one and do the other and that you're going to try to fix, if you can, arrange it so that, yeah, some might be a little bit off, but more or less the same number be off on both sides.
But in that case, you're always going to be off in one direction.
You might find a minimum number of people that won't show up, but you won't find anywhere.
You won't have any idea the maximum.
You'll know the minimum number that won't show.
I think there's a more important aspect of the polling than that.
What's that?
And that it's that people don't answer their phones.
Well, I don't know.
That also throws it off.
Right.
I am not a polling expert by any means, but when I get an unknown number, I usually don't answer it.
This is a big reason.
Yeah, this is a big reason everyone said, this is why you don't know, you know, there's a sleeping giant of Gen Z that's going to change everything because no one knows how they're voting.
They never answer their phones.
There's no polling data on them.
Yeah, I mean, the thing is, ignoring their phone is just as easy as ignoring voting day.
So it turns out that if they don't show up to voting day and they also don't answer the phone when they get polled, then the same result turns out, right?
It's not up to them.
If they don't show up, it's not up to them to decide who's president.
That's it.
Yeah.
I mean, it's just, I think that that affects a lot of polls, whether they want to admit it or not.
I think a lot of polls are affected that way.
I think that there were a lot of junk polls.
There were clearly a lot of junk polls.
You know, there were, I mean, there was a whole polling organization that became an arm of the Republican Party.
You know, and so it's just, how do you include, how do you figure it out?
I don't know.
In the end, there's only one poll that matters.
In the end, it does go back to, you know, those accounts that were saying ignore the polls and just go vote.
Yeah.
But again, you can't say ignore the polls.
And then when a good one comes out for you, say, look at this poll.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's not how it works.
Yeah.
Just cherry-picking polls.
Right.
Yeah.
So, yeah, ignore the polls.
Now, do I think that the candidates themselves should look at polls?
Sure.
I think they should be looking and trying to figure out what to do.
But I also think that some of their decisions are bad ones.
I mean, there was a lot of talk, you know, early right away in the Harris's campaign.
You know, she was saying, we will not go back.
They were calling Trump and other people weird.
They were, you know, dropping the little jokes about the couch.
They were doing these, you know, little things that people were responding to.
And then the strategists got involved and said, we don't think calling them weird is really a good idea.
No, we don't like the slogan, we will not go back.
We think you should talk about policy more.
Now, should both sides be talking about policy more?
Yes.
In these days of TikTok, is anyone going to sit through a policy explanation?
Not many, but you know what does resonate?
We will not go back.
Yeah, they dropped it slogan.
Yeah.
Set it dropped, but that's what humans respond to.
Right.
Yeah.
And they dropped it for a very long time.
Now, was that the cause?
Probably not.
Did it, did it?
Did it affect it by 1%?
Who knows?
Right.
But if, you know, every percent adds up, right?
Yes.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so, you know, I mean, sometimes I feel like, you know, the stuffy old paid strategists, you know, it's like, you know, what's the, why are you listening to them?
Right.
So we have a couple of other uncomfortable questions to get to here before we're done.
So I need to ask you, as a Canadian to an American, David, is it possible that a lot of Americans just don't see any problem or threat from a Trump presidency?
Yes.
Yeah.
I think that, okay, I think there's a lot to unpack there.
Yeah.
I think there is a major, a major factor is denial on the part of those who voted for Trump.
They did so because of one reason or another, and they ignored what he literally said he would do.
You know, they fucked around.
We all find out what the price is.
So someone I was talking to, I said this to them.
And he said, no, it's not that they didn't believe he'd do it.
It's that they did believe what he said.
And this led to a conversation.
It's really a combination.
I compare it to a buffet.
And I said this, you know, I've been saying this for days now.
And then I saw another popular liberal account say it too.
I was like, hey, I said that.
But Trump said so many different and contradictory things.
Yeah.
People could pick and choose what they want to believe and which to deny in accordance with what they wanted and pretend the things they didn't like didn't exist.
So like if I go to a buffet and the buffet has Brussels sprouts on it and I can't stand Brussels sprouts, I'll just ignore the Brussels sprouts.
Even if they offend me.
You know, a vegetarian can go to a buffet and see meat and chicken and pork and they can ignore it and they can get those Brussels sprouts.
And, you know, even if they're offended by the other things, well, they're still at that buffet and maybe those are really good Brussels sprouts to them.
He just said all these different things and people could pretend like, oh, you know, he says those things about deporting people.
He's not really going to do it.
Oh, his comedian said that about Puerto Rico being a guy.
He's just a roast comedian.
Oh, they he said those things about eating cats and dogs.
It's just, you know, and whatever.
January 6th, that was a long time ago.
Like, why, why are you keep bringing that up?
It's so old.
It's so long ago.
So I think there's a lot of denial.
So I have some examples.
And some of these you had kind of hinted at earlier.
But like, I think a perfect example is the states that had abortion on the ballot.
Yeah.
Because in red states, the vote was much higher to protect or reinstate abortion rights than it was to elect Harris.
Yeah.
Like Florida, 57% voted in favor.
Now, it wasn't enough.
They needed 60%.
But 57% voted in favor for constitutional amendment to protect abortion rights.
Let me tell you, 57% of them didn't vote for Harris.
Nope.
Did not.
So somehow people convinced themselves that Trump won't keep going after abortion.
Well, I have seen clips where he says he will protect abortion rights.
Yeah.
I don't believe him when he says it.
He also said he was proud to appoint the Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe versus Wade.
Yeah.
Yeah.
How you believe, and this was one thing, by the way, that really pissed me off about Snopes and a couple of other fact-checking websites was like there was a certain situation where Biden in the first debate and Harris in the second debate said he will go after abortion rights.
He will take them away.
And these fact-checking sites came back and rated that as false.
Trump has stated that he will not do that.
It's not fucking false.
He's a liar.
That means he has two conflicting statements and you say that the one is false because he said the other one.
Yeah.
How does that exist?
Clearly he's lying in one of them.
But that doesn't mean it's this one.
I have donated to Snopes in the past.
I will not be able to do Snopes under their current way of looking at things.
It is this effort to appear balanced, but instead, we've talked about it before, but instead leaning to one side in order to appear balanced.
It's like looking at the leaning tower of Pisa and tilting your head so that you, oh, yeah, that looks straight, you know.
Another example, Missouri.
Voters there voted for abortion rights.
They voted for an increase in the minimum wage.
They voted for paid sick leave.
And they voted for a senator and a president who strongly oppose all those things.
How?
How do you do that?
Yeah, I don't know.
I don't know how you do that.
I don't know.
We're divided enough now in our information streams that it's possible they're getting an entirely different set of information than what I'm getting.
I mean, I'm not even in the States.
I'm from Canada.
I mean, they are.
Yeah.
They must be.
That is my next point.
But I mean, I don't know how you get a different information stream about those issues.
Yeah, yeah, right.
You know, now the economy, there is a huge information disparity.
And I want to quote a few people here because first of all, all the polls showing voters who said that the economy was their top issue, bullshit.
Okay.
Either they were lying or they were making excuses or they were ignorant.
I do think a lot of it was ignorance.
I also think some of it was covering for racism.
But, you know, I do think a lot of it was ignorance.
And the media does play a big role in it for promoting that ignorance or at least not trying to resolve it.
Because the media would do stories like, oh, look, the price of eggs is up.
The price of milk is up.
But that's not a good indicator of the economy.
So Brett Mysalis, co-founder of Midas Touch, he noted in a tweet, stock markets are at record highs, low unemployment, wage growth exceeds inflation.
The best handling of inflation of any G7 nation, energy independence.
And I could go on and on.
But no matter how this result lands, it is amazing how unappreciated successful governments was in this election and how Americans are so willing to bring back into office the guy who caused all the destruction.
And, you know, I was seeing that all over the place.
I don't watch the TV talking heads, but I was flipping my TV to something else to take my mind off it.
And just in a few brief seconds, a TV talking head said 45% of people believe the economy is worse now than four years ago.
Yeah, then 45% of people are morons.
You know, another decent-sized liberal account, Will Stancil, said people were never reacting to inflation or food prices or housing costs or any of it.
It's all just a meme-like social phenomenon.
And now it'll switch to I can afford food again, and everyone will believe it.
And that's exactly it.
It's there some people called it the vibe session.
There was no recession.
The recession never happened, but it felt like a recession because the price of my eggs went up.
Well, you know what else went up for most people?
They're paychecks.
Yeah.
By more than enough to cover that.
But they're just paying attention to, oh, eggs used to cost 99 cents and now they're $1.50.
You know, and also, like, on average, the paychecks increased, but not everyone's paycheck increased.
Right.
So that's the problem.
But on, but all the eggs went up.
Right.
Which is why you get like it's, it's because it's not a level playing field.
This tipped the scales.
There were some groups of people whose paychecks went up and other groups that didn't really.
And those other groups, they hurt more, like they really did, right?
So that's why it's difficult.
It's and it is.
Yeah.
But but the new the media was there were no big media stories about, oh, look, average wage went up too, larger than inflation.
Oh, look, inflation has been tamed now.
Oh, you know, no.
The stories were, oh, milk and eggs were expensive.
Cost of a Thanksgiving meal this year is going to be, you know, 25% more than it was last year.
You know, just the stuff like that.
And so Jay Kuo posted on Twitter that Ipsos last month did polling that shows people who answered factual questions about inflation, crime, and immigration incorrectly were, quote, more likely to opt for Trump, while those who answered correctly preferred Harris.
In other words, those who fell for the BS that we were in a bad economy and had immigration problems were more likely to vote for Trump.
So here are some of the questions.
Violent crime rates are at or near all-time highs in most major American cities.
This was false.
But anyone who watched a football game or any other sporting event or just anything else, that's where I saw these commercials, saw these MAGA commercials insisting crime was at an all-time high in the cities.
And they'd show people running around firing off automatic weapons and everything to emphasize this.
So that was promoted, even though it was a complete lie.
It was promoted by Trump and Republicans.
Inflation in the U.S. has declined over the last year and is near historic averages.
This is true.
But too many people don't understand just because inflation has stopped going up, it's not coming back down.
You know, your eggs are not going to suddenly go back to being the same price they were.
So they still think of it that way.
But that's not the way inflation works.
It always goes up.
If you have deflation, you have a bigger problem for the economy.
The U.S. stock market is at or near all-time highs.
True.
And yet a whole bunch of people were saying it wasn't.
I mean, this is easily accessible information.
And they were saying it wasn't.
Over the last few months, unauthorized border crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border are at or near the lowest level in the last few years.
True.
And yet again, Trump, Vance, all of the MAGAs were promoting, oh, there's this huge number.
Millions and millions are coming in.
Yeah.
And so, yeah, you have this.
I want to quote another popular liberal account, AdgirlMM.
I don't know if you follow her.
She said, despite unprecedented achievement, the majority of voters did not agree that things are good.
Biden's low popularity never reflected his stellar achievements, and Harris suffered by association.
Most American voters are short-sighted, self-focused, low information, and ill-informed.
There's also a clear backlash to liberalism, wokeism.
There was sexism and racism.
But at the end of the day, like Carville always says, it's the economy stupid.
To those who voted with their pocketbooks, you're about to find out what a real bad economy feels like.
You deserve it too, but we'll all suffer.
Now, you know, she had that part about liberalism and wokeism in there.
And I left it in.
I could have just cut that quote out because the emphasis, she's right, is on the economy stuff.
And I know a lot of the moderate Democrats are saying, oh, we all got too woke.
I don't know.
Do I think that impacted a little bit?
I do think it impacted.
I know.
Like to say that, you know what, we need to try to become more exactly like the party that beat us is I don't even know how to describe that tactic.
That's a football tactic.
That's not a political tactic.
Yeah.
Meat football and politics are a world apart.
They really are.
Like, why do you, you know, the other side had such big linebackers.
We need to get bigger linebackers.
That's in football.
That might be true in football.
This is not true in politics.
Why do they think that?
This is the other side wants to take away more rights and treat people horribly.
Therefore, we should go along with it.
Yeah.
No.
Right.
No.
That's not what we should be doing.
Why?
I understand what they're saying.
I know people who, you know, at the last election, because these were people I worked with, said, well, I'm not going to vote for Trump.
But, you know, people like AOC and these other, you know, woke people with all their, you know, BS, they really piss me off.
And, you know, then don't vote for them.
Right.
Well, except that they associated with Biden and they associated with Harris.
And it's like, I understand, but until, again, this goes back to what I was saying before, until we have solid information, you can't say it was because of the wokeism.
And even if you do get this, let's say we do get solid information and say that.
Does that mean we should change it?
No.
What we need to change is the messaging.
Explain why it's important.
You know, explain why it is important to care about other people And how we treat them, not just toss them aside, right?
Yeah.
Um, I do have, I know I've been talking for a long time here, but I do have uh, um, so excited, David.
I can't imagine what has animated you this way.
Yes, yes.
Um, some other, uh, you know, some of the denial/slash confirmation bias.
Uh, you mentioned earlier about Latinos.
So, I think the number that I saw was 45% of Latinos voted for Trump.
Yep, that's right by my number.
While he campaigned with promises of a massive deportation, this makes as much sense as the white blue-collar workers who voted for him.
Yeah, not doing anything for them either.
He talks while he talked about giving billionaires tax cuts.
Uh, it talks about the trickle-down economy, I think.
I don't understand.
Well, no, it's because they well, they believe the other stuff about the economy.
Um, okay, it's it's like the I mean, Jews voted for uh him in very low numbers, yeah, but there were some I have relatives who did, um, and you know, they voted for him because, well, Israel, okay, and again, picking and choosing.
How can you say he's better for Jews when he hangs out with literal Nazis?
Yeah, for real Nazis, yeah, like card-carrying, yeah, yeah, you know, again, the buffet picking and choosing women voting for him.
How do you have women voting for him when he literally wants to control your body?
Uh, yeah, Kamala did uh less well this election with white women than Biden did with white women, uh, but Trump still got more than half of white women.
I, you know, I don't know how what happened there, how I mean, I think we can justify this.
I don't understand, yeah, I think we can make a guess, um, you know, it there are two words that end in ism, uh, you know, and so uh, we'll get to that, it's on the list, yeah.
I have a clip actually for that, okay.
But, uh, um, and then, but going, you know, going back to the Latinos in particular, um, there was a BBC article, and the title of it was it's simple, really, why Latinos flocked to Trump's working class coalition.
And so they have some quotes from some people.
So, uh, Samuel Negron, a Pennsylvania state constable and member of a large Puerto Rican community in the city of Allentown, said, We liked the way things were four years ago.
Now, right off the bat, I'm like, do you remember four years ago?
Because you're an idiot if you think you liked it.
Pandemic four years ago.
Yeah.
And then, so he was talking about he and other Trump supporters listed other reasons that, including that their community felt social issues and a perception that their family values now align more with the Republican Party.
And there is some of that.
I have heard and seen that before, that many Latinos are religious.
I think there's a fair amount of Catholicism in the Latino community.
And so, you know, so you look to the Republican Party, who is allegedly more religious.
But then the article goes on to say the most common factor, however, was the economy, specifically inflation.
And then this guy again says, out here, you pay $5 for a dozen eggs.
It used to be a dollar or even 99 cents.
A lot of us have woken up, in my opinion, from democratic lies that things have been better.
We realize things were better then.
Now, first of all, if you're paying $5 for a dozen eggs, you need to find a new store.
Yeah, and I don't, it's been a long time since he had paid $1.99 for a dozen eggs, I would imagine.
I mean, I could, you know, maybe go to Aldi and, you know, on a deal, get them that for that amount.
But the same store didn't go from a dollar to $5.
No, I don't think so.
You know, so while this guy is saying we've woken up from Democratic lies, no, no, you're falling for Republican lies.
Here's the weirdest one.
Polls also suggested that many Latinos across the U.S. and in Pennsylvania specifically were drawn to Trump's proposals to drop or to block migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border and enact much stricter immigration laws.
Daniel Campo, a Venezuelan-American, said Trump's claims of creeping socialism reminded him of the situation he left in his home country.
He said, I understand what migrants are leaving, but you have to do it the right way.
I came the right way.
Things have to be done legally.
Many of us were worried that the borders were just open under the Harris, the Biden-Harris administration.
It's we've seen this before.
We all know someone like this, and we've seen it before in polling.
I mean, look at Ted Cruz.
You know, Ted Cruz is an immigrant family who hates immigrants now.
And you could find a lot of people like that.
We got ours.
We're here.
Now you stay out.
Yeah.
And how many of them are worried about the border between U.S. and Canada just being an open border?
Just curious.
I mean, it would be the other way around.
Right now, people would be fleeing to Canada.
Let me tell you, I'd join you if not for two things.
Okay.
I would be up in your area right now.
Or at least in the next couple months.
We got lots of room in Saskatchewan, David.
Northern Saskatchewan still has, you know, quarter sections you can get from the government.
I'm sure.
Make a deal.
Yeah, there's two problems with that.
One, I don't like the cold.
Oh, well, that's okay.
Well, so I'm kind of screwed there.
Okay.
Right.
And two, my plan is to move closer to my kids, not further from them, you know.
So, I mean, if you know, if I, if, if I can have everything up, if I could pick everybody up and move them somewhere, then it would probably be to you know, someplace like Australia or New Zealand or, you know, someplace nice like that.
Um, but, you know, they have jobs and, you know, stuff like that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So I'm done with my examples for now.
Move on to the next item on our list here.
So I know this is where you and I are going to disagree most strongly.
I feel like this is where we're going to disagree most strongly.
We haven't got to all the issues yet, but this one, we're definitely going to clash a little bit, but butt heads.
But and I don't want to get too, too deep on this because it's on the list of future episodes.
But there's a thing, there's a concept that is generally called American exceptionalism, which is the idea that the solutions that occur well in other places don't mean anything as soon as you cross the border into the United States because the United States is exceptional in some way that's never defined and that therefore, You know, up is down, left is right.
We're exceptional.
Everything is different somehow.
Right.
Yeah.
We're exceptional in getting kids killed in school shootings.
When you are exceptional, you know, we're not a brag.
It's terrible.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, we're exceptional in paying higher prices for medicine and, you know, health-related costs.
Yep.
So yeah, we're, you know, we're exceptional in all sorts of ways.
Yes.
And so, you know, being the most powerful country in the world, you get a lot of attention from the other countries that you affect.
You know, there's people, there's people who have said on Twitter, you know, they just, they, they say that people in the other countries don't have a stake in this and should shut up.
And I tell them that everything that the U.S. does affects Canada in some way, most especially the stupid and terrible things the U.S. does.
And if they expect us to go through this silently, then they're just mistaken.
Canadians are not going to just suffer silently.
That's not how we do it.
Yeah.
I've also seen people say, people in, you know, Canadians must feel like they're living above a crackhouse.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We do feel like we're living above a crackhouse, but we're still willing to loan you, give you a cup of sugar.
That's, we're still good neighbors.
We don't care.
Yeah, okay.
Right.
They might make crack down there.
But you know what?
If they need sugar for their coffee, by golly, we're not going to turn them down.
Jesus.
But why, you know, like this is the sentiment is that the rest of the world should just shut up and put up.
But from my perspective, I don't have a say in the U.S. election, but it greatly affects me and everything around me.
So where do we sit with this?
Like, is there, is it possible that, as I think has happened in the past, there becomes a great pressure from the world to wish a certain candidate not become president.
And some people in the U.S. just stubbornly say, oh, that's what the rest of the world wants.
We should go this way because it's us against the world.
And whatever's good for the world is not good for us.
So obviously that just means we should go for whatever the world doesn't want.
Like, is it possible that there's some weird logic happening here?
I think anyone who had that kind of logic was already voting Trump anyway.
I don't think it changed.
I don't think it changed minds.
I don't think people were.
Trump's vote total was almost identical.
So you might be right.
Yeah.
I don't think people were like, well, I was going to vote for Harris, but then I heard that people in England want her to win.
So therefore, I'm going to vote Trump.
The only way that would happen is if you were already leaning towards the, you know, Trump, well, we should be charging for our services to the United Nations and to NATO.
And, you know, what is this nonsense?
We shouldn't be giving it away for free.
So I don't think it's changed.
I mean, never say zero, but any even insignificant portion, I don't think it changed.
All right.
All right.
Well, we'll get deeper into that in a full episode eventually.
I don't know when months from now, maybe.
So, next topic: there were a large number of celebrity endorsements this election, and I don't know the exact number, but it felt like there was a lot more than usually happens.
There were celebrities that don't normally get in any way involved in politics that spoke up.
Uh, Harrison Ford made his own little video about who he thought should be president, which my old man never says anything.
He was your old neighbor, yeah.
Before I lived there, he lived in a house across the street before I moved in there.
But yes, right, he did graduate from the same high school as me.
We will be able to say, I will never say that.
All right.
Um, so you know, we had this huge number.
I mean, uh, there were a lot of celebrities who get involved kind of every election who spoke up, but there was a also a number that never say anything, and they also spoke up.
And there were so many celebrities who were endorsing Kamala Harris.
And so, from the outside, you might part of the sort of the smoke and mirror is the illusion that there was no possible way that Trump could win this.
But based on the numbers, I mean, we had the numbers kind of at the top of this section here of Trump's total being nearly identical to what it previously was, and Harris's total being 10 to 11 million votes lower than Joe Biden.
Um, is it possible that this turned some people off that they dug their heels in for this reason instead of the like I mentioned before in the just a last note there about the American exceptionalism where they look at the rest of the world, say the rest of the world wants us to go this way, we don't want to go that way?
Uh, did they look at the celebrity endorsements and say, Oh, yeah, Hollywood wants that, we don't want that if that's what Hollywood wants, or that's what the you know, music industry wants, or whatever.
Is that a possibility that there was just too much?
So, first, before I answer that, I do want to tell you, as we are recording, I just got a news update that multiple news outlets are calling Arizona for Trump now.
Oh, yeah, so since you had mentioned that last year, I did want to give the update like real-time results, ring the bell, yeah.
Um, but with that said, um, I think that I still give the same answer.
I don't think that that I think what it did was it flipped maggots against those stars, at least some, but I don't think anyone said, Well, I'm voting for Harris, and then Han Solo came out and said, Vote for Harris, and they were like, No, I didn't like uh Han Solo, you know, like Harrison Ford, yeah, he shot first, you know, and they should have to change that movie, and now he's endorsing Harris.
So, I'm gonna vote for Trump.
He's woke now that he didn't shoot first, yeah, right.
And some people did say that.
Well, some people said, you know, oh, I didn't know that he was woke.
I, you know, yeah, yeah, right.
And so, you know, they're coming out now.
By the time all is said and done, or is it going to have an impact on any of their lives or careers?
No, you know, just like you know, I don't think Beyonce was too worried about it.
I don't think Taylor Swift was too worried about it.
Oh, no, they're fine, they'll be fine.
I was a little annoyed at the latecomers, like, where have you been?
Mark Hamill's been out there fighting the good fight for months and months, years, really, years, yeah.
Yeah.
And then Harrison Ford in like, you know, two days before the election, which, by the way, was after many of us had already voted.
Then he comes out and it's like, you know, Dick Van Dyke, same thing.
You know, I mean, he especially, I mean, the man's over 100 or something like that.
He should have voted.
He should have done it as soon as he could.
I'm surprised he's not think there's any sort of backlash to that.
You know, it's just like some people have joked about, and I'm sure there will be on Saturday Night Live tonight, there will be a joke about, you know, all the emails and texts and everything.
And yeah, people get annoyed by them.
I got annoyed by them.
My family got annoyed by them.
I wasn't going to vote for Trump because I got too many emails.
Maybe a few people did, but it sure wasn't what swung the election.
Yeah.
Yeah, I don't know what to make of that.
It's just one of the oddities.
But I think that you're probably right that it didn't change the needle in either direction.
I don't know how much celebrity endorsements really matter.
They had a lot, so they used them, but I don't think they, I think they put a lot of energy into it when it wasn't changing anything.
Yeah, I think that, I think that endorsements matter like when Taylor Swift told everybody, go out and register to vote.
There were a lot of people who registered, but I think they registered and then didn't show up.
Yeah, then the question is, did they vote?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Exactly.
I don't think they did.
So I, yeah.
So I think some people have that kind of power and some don't.
Yeah.
And most of the ones didn't.
I mean, no one suddenly decided to vote for Harris because Dick Van Dyke said so.
No.
I don't think anyone voted for Harris because Harrison Ford showed up.
No.
I don't think so.
I just don't.
When it comes at that late stage, and I hate to say it about people like Harrison Ford and Dick Van Dyke because I like them.
It was almost virtue signaling at that point.
Like, oh, everybody's come out and endorsed.
I better do it too.
Joe Rogan waited till the night before to endorse Trump.
That's true.
I don't know.
I don't think it matters much.
I don't think it changes anything.
And I think if anything, they spent too much time trying to show how popular they were to try to say, we're popular, vote with the popular side.
And that wasn't moving the needle.
It was a waste of time and energy.
And I don't think they should bother with it.
I don't think it matters.
Yeah.
I mean, it's hard to say because the other thing that they tried, well, Harris tried to do was she was like, look, Liz Cheney endorses me.
Dick Cheney endorses me.
All of Trump's cabinet endorses me.
Oh, you know, et cetera, et cetera.
That should have moved the needle.
But instead.
Sort of.
But is it possible that the endorsements and the appearances with the Cheneys and all that stuff?
Is it possible that that turned some people off and they said, I remember Dick Cheney?
He's terrible.
Yes.
And that's what the leftists, some of the leftists said, was why are you campaigning with the Cheneys instead of campaigning with AOC and Bernie?
They're the ones who you need to.
Except, I mean, even though she lost, I still agree with it because the leftists had a choice.
They could vote for Harris or they could not vote.
They weren't going to vote for Trump.
Okay.
Okay.
The people allegedly in the middle who might have voted with, you know, might have voted Republican before, those were the ones you needed to get on your side.
And if you look at the way some of the local races went, it wasn't a red wave, like some people said.
It was a Trump wave.
And so I want to quote one more person here, and this came through just earlier today from Mike Rothschild, and he is a conspiracy studier.
Yeah.
And he said, we all want the reason, quote, Trump won.
What if the reason is just that he's Trump?
He disrupted politics in a way nobody ever has, created an unreproducible cult of personality around his celebrity and image.
And with him off the board as a candidate, the map will scramble again.
We know now that Trump outran the rest of the GOP.
They lost Senate seats in states he won.
House Dems might not actually lose any seats.
This wasn't a red wave.
It was Trump, and he won't be a candidate again.
Nobody in the GOP can replicate what he's done.
Vance can't do it.
Don Jr. can't do it.
DeSantis or Carrie Lake sure as hell can't do it.
He's been the driving force of American politics for a decade and will likely take his cult with him once he leaves.
Now, this is something you and I had debated and discussed in earlier podcasts.
I mean, it sounds right.
I believe him.
I think that, again, go back to what I said earlier.
We don't know.
It will take a lot of study.
Right.
Early numbers seem to support what he said.
Okay.
But I do have a counter to that, David.
No.
Oh, okay.
Go ahead.
Well, I'm looking at the results right now.
So in the Senate, the Republicans gained four Senate seats.
They have 53 as of now.
I don't know how close these are, and I don't know if any might still on recounts slip.
But as of now, and they're four days in now.
Well, three days in the middle.
They're still gaining three.
Well, they had 50 before.
Well, this says they gained four seats and the Dems lost four seats.
But there's still one.
I guess there's one here that's still looking to change or whatever.
But 53 is a majority in the Senate.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Right.
So looking at the House, these results here from the Associated Press say that the Republicans gained two seats in the House.
The Dems lost two.
Now, okay, so that was the one part of his quote that I skipped.
He said, Republicans are on track to gain just three.
Three of them were vacant.
So it wasn't necessarily that they gained them or lost them.
You know, they're individual races is what I was trying to get at, what Mike was trying to get.
Okay.
Mike Rothschild was trying to get at here.
Right.
You know, I'm not saying Republicans didn't make gains.
They obviously did.
But as we were talking about the fact that you mentioned Michigan, and I think also Wisconsin, Democrats kept their Senate seats while Trump won the state.
Yeah.
You know, that shows it was a personality issue.
People were not necessarily voting on issues.
Missouri, the one that I mentioned earlier, clearly shows it was personality because three major issues, they voted against what Trump wanted.
Yeah.
I think that does lend support to it being personality.
It could also lend support to it being Harris against Harris personality or Harris's race or sex.
You know, it's hard to say.
Like I said, we won't know the answers to these.
I mean, we may never know because every person who studies it will probably have their own little biases.
Right.
But hopefully at some point, they could at least come out with some information that will help in the future.
One thing I can say, and maybe we should, you know, maybe I should save this till the end for the summary or something.
Some people are saying, oh, look, you know, Harris is going to run in 28 and she will win.
Harris is not going to run in 28.
Harris is not Trump.
She lost once.
She is done.
And even if she weren't done, I think that backers and donors would be like, you're done.
Go find a nice candidate.
Yeah.
There are lots of other candidates.
If my girl doesn't crumble.
Right.
If there is an election.
If there's an election, there will be a candidate.
My governor will be running.
I guarantee.
Pritzker will be running.
Budijedge will be running.
Yeah.
But one thing I can tell you, it'll probably be a white man because I think too much of the party will be afraid.
And I'm not saying I endorse this by any means, but too much of the party will be afraid to put a woman again or a person of color.
Now, it's possible there could be a man of color.
None spring to mind right now.
And I know someone's probably yelling right now.
What about this guy?
What about that?
I don't know.
In this moment, they don't spring to mind.
But they're sure as hell.
I'm sorry.
They're sure as hell not going to run a woman.
It's just not going to happen.
It's terrible, but it's not going to happen.
Yeah.
So these next two, because it feels like turnout on the one side was the biggest issue here by the numbers that we talked about earlier.
11 million fewer votes for Harris than there was for Biden in 2020.
These next two are potentially, in my opinion, maybe the more on point things to talk about as far as this.
We waited to the end.
Yes.
He had to wait till this far to get them.
So we haven't talked about Israel very.
Listeners have made it here.
Yeah.
We haven't talked about Israel much and the whole conflict there on this podcast.
I haven't made it a focal point.
I stupidly thought that it wasn't going to severely affect the election.
Canada doesn't play a major role there.
I had other things to talk about.
There was, you know, on the list of all the things.
I mean, I was thinking about it.
I want to list all the things that John Belushi mentioned in the Blues brothers.
I couldn't afford, you know, I forgot which day it was.
I didn't have cab fare, all that stuff.
We haven't talked about it a lot.
But I wonder if this has is part of what happened.
Because I think that there's like there's a modified trolley problem that should be mentioned.
I mean, the trolley problem is a thought experiment where you're on a trolley, a train, and it has a track.
And on the current track that you're on, there's whatever, three people tied to the tracks, and it's going to run them over.
And then you can flick a switch in the trolley that switches it to the other track.
And then on the other track, there's only one person.
Right.
Right.
And so the original trolley problem is that should you flick the switch to avoid the three people?
And then if you do, there's kind of the second question, which is, oh, did you just kill that guy?
Because by your hand, if not for your action, he would have died.
He wouldn't have died, right?
He would have lived.
Right.
So if you had just done nothing.
So the modified trolley problem in this case is that if you're not on the trolley, if you're on the street near the trolley and no one's watching you, and there's a switch to flick to change the track and you see it, you see the trolley coming and there's three people on the track and then there's one on the other track and you can flick the switch to switch it, but no one will know that you had the opportunity to switch.
Do you just walk the other way and never look and just ignore it?
Because you don't want to have to deal with the potential guilt of being the one who chose one to die.
The other option of not doing anything is worse.
But if you don't look, you don't feel that it's worse.
It feels like you don't have to deal with it, that you just turn off and you ignore the whole problem.
Like that's one of the options on the trolley problem that's not in the original, but is in this modified version.
So transporting this onto this, there were a lot of people who have been very angry at the Biden administration for their stance on Israel, their continued support of Israel.
And we haven't talked about on this podcast what our feelings are about it at all.
In large part, at least from my perspective, because it is so complicated.
It is complicated.
It's very weak.
We should do a podcast on people who want simple answers to everything.
We should do that sometime.
Wow, David, if only we had someone who was going to put that together and put notes on that.
Wow.
Yeah.
But anyway.
Yeah, wow.
Okay.
Too bad you're too busy, right?
Yeah.
After survivor's season's over, maybe.
Yeah.
You know, many of those involved in this issue on both sides, on all sides.
I won't even say there are two sides.
There are many, many sides believe that there are simple answers.
And there aren't.
There just aren't.
I'm sorry.
And because of that simplistic view of things, they have come out and said, I will not vote for Harris because of and then they use some very loaded words, which I'm not going to repeat here because, like I said, they're purposely using them as loaded words.
And now, some of them back down.
Some of the Democrats who had said this in the past, as the election approached and it was clear it was going to be close, they suddenly realized, oh, hell, I may be making things worse.
It's one thing to vote your conscience or what you're claiming your conscience is when it's not going to be close.
It's another to do it when it's close.
And so a lot of the Democrats who had been saying, I don't know if I could endorse her, dah, dah, dah, came out in those last few days saying, no, go vote.
Go vote for her.
It'll be better than Trump.
Is it too late then?
Right.
Possibly.
Yeah.
I don't know.
You know, they've been saying for months and months one thing.
And then all of a sudden they're like, oh, well, no, I was wrong about that.
Or, you know, just ignore what I said before.
And that's a trick that works for Republicans pretty good.
No, it doesn't work very well for the Democrat side.
No.
No.
And it's, it's, Do I believe?
And again, this goes back to what I was saying earlier, where the people on the far left, and that includes people involved in this issue, are saying it was definitely this that did it.
I don't think it was definitely this.
Honestly, I don't know that 1% of the electorate cares.
I don't want to say cares.
Cares is a bad word.
I don't think 1% of the electorate was willing to change their vote because of this issue.
I don't think half percent was.
When I say change their vote, I mean that they didn't already lean one way or the other and they switched it.
Because sure.
But is it could it have been a factor for turnout for the Democratic side?
I mean, most of them that talked about it didn't say, I'm simply not going to go vote.
They said, I'm going to go vote Jill Stein, or I'm going to vote for whatever other third party, or I'm going to leave the president blank if there is no third party because they still have to register their displeasure somehow.
And the way to do that isn't to not vote.
It's to vote, but not for Harris or Trump.
Yeah.
In most of the states I've looked at, and I haven't looked at all of them, but there were some that I just perused.
In most of those, there were some that still had RFK Jr. on the ballot.
Yep, Illinois did.
Jill Stein was on the ballot in over half the states.
And about the 10 or so that I looked at, and I don't have a comprehensive list here, but there might still be some where this isn't totally true.
But in all the ones I looked at, the grand total of third-party votes thrown onto the Kamala Harris side in some total was not going to change the thing in the other direction for almost every state that I looked at.
Which is different from the past, where it was 2016.
Jill Stein made a noted difference in several states because it was felt strongly that a lot of the people voting for Jill Stein would have voted for Hillary if there wasn't a Jill Stein option.
Yeah.
Or they would have just sat out, which hard, you know, obviously would have to not change the outcome.
But if they had voted for Hillary instead of Jill Stein, that would have made a difference in those states and would have changed that entire election.
In this one, it doesn't seem to have made any difference at all.
Those vote totals were so small and the margin was wide enough between Trump and Harris that it didn't change anything.
That's right, which is why I think that those involved in this issue who are proclaiming that they were the reason that Harris lost, you have to be very deep in the confirmation bias to believe that.
I do not believe that Israel and Gaza were the reason.
Now, like I said, do I know, for example, Jewish people, am I related to Jewish people who voted for Trump?
Yeah.
Yes.
Did they say that a big part of it was Israel?
Yes.
Did they vote for Trump before?
Yeah.
Did they vote for Republicans before, almost primarily?
Yeah.
So did this switch them from a Democrat to a Republican?
No.
No, it didn't.
Yeah.
I know more Jewish people who switched the other way.
Yeah.
from Republican to Democrat because of Trump's dealing with neo-Nazis than who switched to Trump because of Israel.
Okay.
Well, actually, I know zero who switched.
I personally know zero who switched to Trump for any reason.
Jewish people.
Right.
But it doesn't mean.
I mean, I'm not the end all.
Right.
I'm just saying.
of all the people that I know, they were either already voting Trump and stayed voting Trump or they switched to Harris, at least for this time.
Yeah.
Well, you know, and I suspect it was a contributing factor.
To what?
To the, you know, the overall vote, you know, not showing up for the Democratic side that was expected to, you know, I mean, everyone thought this was, they were going to be at least as popular as Biden was in 2020.
A lot of people did.
I mean, again, we're back to there's no way to.
You know, like almost every protester at the colleges that was doing this was a young voter.
And the young voters, despite the fact they had a lot more people who registered, still didn't show up in very big numbers.
But, okay, how many protesters were there?
Maybe 100, a couple hundred at each of the various campuses that made the news.
That didn't swing it.
I mean, what about all the people they know?
I mean, if they weren't out there protesting, they probably didn't give a shit or not enough to deal with it.
Like what happened?
Like, here's the thing that can happen.
Someone goes to a protest and the things happen there, however they happen.
And then later on, the other people who didn't go to protest are having coffee with that person.
They're talking about, you know, what the world is like and how things are and who they should vote for and whether this candidate sucks or that candidate's good or whether they should even care about any of it at all.
I mean, those conversations affect entire, or really the fabric that affect entire demographics.
It's the real reason we have demographics is because the people in, we imagine the people in those subgroups talk amongst each other more than they talk to people outside those groups.
If they didn't, demographics would mean nothing.
Yeah, but those same demographics were also concerned with women's rights and abortion rights and gun, well, you know, getting rid of, you know, guns.
So to assume that just because one person is a single issue voter, that means everyone they talk to will become a single issue voter.
I think is a, I think that's a bad idea because, like I said, I mean, yeah, do I hang out with a bunch of Gen Zers or alphas or whatever the hell they are now?
No.
But the ones I see are screaming into the wind and they want to make themselves sound like a big, they had a big impact.
And I really just don't think they did.
They had an impact, but I think it was a negligible impact because, like I said, if you want to make yourself known, if you care so much that you protest in a way that breaks the law, breaks your university's rules, might get you kicked out, might lose you a future job.
That's how much you care.
You're not just going to not vote.
You're going to go vote for someone else.
I don't think that's necessarily true.
I think it's very possible that they care about this and then still don't vote because they're not in the practice of voting.
I mean, this is part of the reason why young people don't vote is because they're not in the practice of it.
They don't know how much it matters.
They haven't seen enough of the world to see how it affects it.
That these people are so involved in their cause, but they don't do the one thing that could register their true opinion in there.
People have all kinds of illogical decisions in this.
I know that, especially when they're all driven by feelings.
Yes.
I just think I, you know, I mean, if their feelings are going to need to seize some data and I'm right.
This is just speculation.
Yeah.
I'm going to have to completely disagree with you.
That's fine.
You're allowed.
Yeah.
Right.
I think that the data will not show that.
Okay.
And that's fine.
And I'm okay being wrong if it turns out that I'm wrong.
But based on what I know of humans, it's very possible that they're very passionate about what's happening in Gaza and they don't want to support anything to do with Biden and the Democrats.
They think Trump sucks and they have something to do that day that they say is more important anyway.
Like whatever that is.
I just don't.
And they just say, you know what?
Screw it.
All of them are screwed.
I'm just going to move on.
I'm sure there are a few.
I just don't think it was anything above a negligible number.
Right.
Right.
Yeah.
Because I think I think there were, and I know humans are not logical beings, but anyone with a grain of logic would say, huh, yeah, I don't like what Harris is doing, but Trump may turn Gaza into a parking lot.
We know that's true.
Absolutely.
But there were people who were saying, if I don't get my way on Gaza, I'm not supporting Democrats.
I know.
Which is really like holding the entire thing hostage for your one.
Yeah.
Right.
It's saying, I will absolutely contribute to making it three times as bad if I don't get my way on this one thing right now before the election.
And I'm sure you saw people who were saying that on Twitter.
I saw them.
Yeah.
We've seen it before.
We saw it in Trump versus Hillary.
Okay.
We saw the far left who still claimed that Hillary stole the election from Bernie and thought Bernie would be a better candidate.
And they refused to support her.
And a lot of them were saying things like, whether outwardly or to themselves, we're saying, well, we'll show them.
Trump will be elected.
He'll be so bad that this country will swing so far to the left that it will come back to us.
So we will have to endure four years of Trump, but in the end, it will all be better.
It's the same reasoning.
Once you've learned your lesson, you'll learn that you have to cater to us.
Right.
Yeah.
That's.
It's the same type of reasoning that evangelicals use to support Trump.
Well, we hate him, but he's going to put conservative judges who respect our religious beliefs on the court.
So it's okay.
And the thing is, you'd think they'd have learned their lesson, but they didn't.
And some of them talked about it again in those very same words.
They talked about it again.
And it's like, I'm sorry.
I know some of these people and they act like toddlers.
They don't learn their lesson.
They keep touching the hot stove.
You know?
And I don't understand it.
They are so deep in their beliefs.
You know, we talk about Trump being, you know, Trumpers being a cult.
Some of them are a cult.
I'm not saying, you know, I don't want anyone to come on here, you know, anyone who's listening after almost two hours at this point, you know, to come on and start attacking me and use and saying, you called me a cult member because I think that, you know, Gazans should have human rights.
No, I'm not saying that.
Yeah, Gazans should have human rights.
Right.
I'm saying that holding an entire party hostage to make things worse in all likelihood for those people that you claim to want to make things better for is ridiculous behavior.
Yeah.
And that's the thing.
The perfect is the enemy of the good.
Yeah, it's never perfect in politics.
Right.
It's never perfect.
I had a boss for many years I had to fight this on because she would want everything to be perfect.
And it couldn't be.
She would send documents back to us time and time again.
Make it perfect.
Make it perfect.
Okay.
One, it doesn't have to be perfect.
Two, we have deadlines to meet and it can't be perfect because what you want is not what the law says or what you want is not doable.
It can't be the world is not a perfect place.
There is not a way to pick someone who is going, excuse me, to be elected who perfectly represents every single one of your values, your personal values.
Yeah.
Do I agree with every single thing that Biden did or said, that Harris did or said?
No.
Yeah.
But that doesn't, but on the whole, I'm going to look at that, look at her, and say, well, she represents a hell of a lot of what I believe.
And sometimes it's possible that you vote for a candidate and then immediately disagree with some policy they have.
And right.
Yeah.
I mean, that's you don't have to support everything that they do.
It just has to be the best option.
Right.
This is why we saw Republicans like Cheney, Kinzinger, some of the other, you know, either current or former Republicans coming out and saying, and doing what they could to elect Harris.
They even said, do I agree with a lot of her positions?
No, but I agree with American democracy.
I agree with supporting the Constitution.
Those are the important things to me.
The idea that Trump could get re-elected after January 6th is mind-boggling.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
And so, and yet these people were being more rational than some who claim to be Democrats.
Right.
So we have one more point, and I think it's probably the most important one.
Oh, good.
Good thing you left it for last then.
So that we'll have, you know, like two listeners who make it this far.
To those who work hard, should go the best stuff.
Yeah, that's right.
And that is racism and sexism.
Yep.
So, I mean, we talked, we had an episode right after the first debate between Trump and Biden.
And Biden didn't do very well.
He had not dropped out.
And we talked about this.
And I listened to it earlier today.
We said that if there was a lot of talk about what to do, whether they should replace Biden, what's going on, we sort of felt that they shouldn't replace Biden.
I don't even know if we were right at the time.
There's no way to know until we reverse time and change that decision, which we're obviously not going to do.
So, I mean, we need the choose your own adventure book.
Yeah, we need to choose your own adventure.
Yeah, to see what, you know, flip to that page and see how it turned out before you actually choose.
And that's not how it works.
But we said that if they're going to replace Biden, they should pick Kamala.
She's the likely choice.
To skip past that would be worse of the options.
And I still think that's true.
But I also stand by the fact that I part of this I place on Biden.
Biden said before he ran in 2020 that he was a one-term president.
He's only there the one time specifically.
I'd have to look it up, but I've heard people say that he said that.
And I do remember something about it.
He's really, he should have been one term.
He's already 80 at the time.
He believed he would be.
I believed he would be a one-term president.
He's really old.
And there are some people saying they should have ran Bernie again.
I'm like, Bernie's like, what, 87 or something?
Like, get out of here.
He was too old when he ran in 2016, really.
Yeah.
Like he was in decent shape, but he was already really old.
Yes.
Yeah.
Do I think that Biden is still with it enough?
Yeah.
As far as I know, yes.
I know there's lots of accusations of would he be with it for another four years?
No.
I don't know either.
I don't know.
You know, because you don't know what's going on.
You have no idea what could happen medically.
What could, you know, we don't know.
Yeah.
I think he did the right thing for the country by dropping out when he did.
But I think he would have done a better thing for the country if he had dropped out of the race in like January.
And we said that's what he should have done really is reverse time even further back to the first couple pages of the Choose Your Own Adventure and gone that way.
Said, run the whole primary without me.
Yeah.
Kamala can run for president if she likes against whoever else, whatever.
And y'all decide.
Yeah, it would have been Kamala against Pritzker.
Against what's his name?
Newsom.
The governor of California, Newsom.
Yeah.
Maybe Budijej would have gotten in there.
Maybe he wouldn't have felt comfortable going against Harris.
I don't know.
But we would have seen what happened at that point.
Because, okay, we're going to play this clip now.
This was Edward S. Glaude Jr.
He's a professor at James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor.
So he's speaking on MSNBC yesterday or earlier today.
I don't have to cue this up.
Let me get this.
All right.
There's this sense that whiteness is under threat.
The demographic shifts, the country isn't what all of these racially ambiguous children on Cheerio's commercials are confusing the hell out of me.
A lot of people voted because their life's too damn expensive.
And it was here.
They voted for, you're telling me, Stephanie, that all of these people who believe that their lives are, that bread is too high and eggs are too high, that they voted for a convicted fella, a guy who said we can grab the pea.
I think that a lot of people.
They voted for this guy.
I'm not defending it, but I think there are tons of people that don't pay attention to, and I'm not defending it, don't pay attention to politics at all.
But while we live in the most prosperous country in the world, people are saying life's not fair.
I'm not doing well.
My son's still living in the basement.
I can't seem to get a job.
I don't like the status quo.
I'm voting for something else.
And he's a little bit more than that.
I love you.
But I do not believe that.
I cannot believe that.
And the reason I think you believe it is because you don't want to believe that that's what's really motivating them.
It's always the case.
People don't want to believe what the country actually is because if they believe it, they're going to have to confront what's in them.
I don't believe that.
They voted for a crook, a person who they know is stealing from, just doing everything to undermine the so-called country that they love.
And then they're telling us the BS that it's economics.
We know that's not true.
All right.
So that was a professor speaking on MSNBC about this.
So let me say I agree with them both.
Yeah.
Well, like I said, I think they're both right.
I think you are right that they're both right.
There's not one factor.
There's many factors.
And those are two of them.
I mean, I said it earlier.
I said it probably almost two hours ago.
I said the polls say that people are voting for the economy.
And the people who say that are either lying or ignorant.
Or covering for racism, which was also, that's the lying.
That's the lying part.
I just didn't say it as blatantly.
Well, you can now we're in the racism section.
It's okay.
Yes.
So either they are on doing what he said or they're doing what she said.
So it's probably a combination because yeah, I don't care if someone says this is a secret poll.
Your name will never be used.
Okay.
We will never link this to you in any way.
If you answered your phone and someone started asking you questions, the easiest thing to say is the economy.
You're not going to say, well, I don't want to elect that black Asian woman.
Even if you believe that or one part of that, you're not going to say it in many cases.
So you say the economy.
And then there are, I mean, I talked about it earlier.
There are the low information voters who truly don't understand or realize how good the economy is.
And yes, you mentioned for some of them, it's not so great, but that's always going to be the case.
Unfortunately, in this country, for some people, it will always be the case.
But not for the majority, not for everybody who said the economy was the problem.
And so, yeah, I think they are absolutely both correct in this.
And, you know, I'm glad he loves her to bits or loves her to life, I think is what he said.
That's what he said, yeah.
A phrase I've never heard before.
Well, I guess I've heard I love you to death, but he didn't want to say death.
So he said, I love you to life.
Now we're analyzing what they say.
But they're both right.
That's all I can say.
I think both aspects are factors.
I think that there are some people who still, and if I was going to pick one factor more than another, I would say sexism is a bigger factor.
Unfortunately.
Well, yes.
And I think that, you know, I have seen that.
Again, I don't mean to cast aspersions or anything.
I have seen it said that like as one reason for the Latino vote shifting.
Again, from what I have read, in the Latino communities, they are more conservative.
They are more the man runs the household.
And so do they want a woman in charge of the country?
Maybe not.
Again, not every.
Yeah.
You know, and, you know, these are trends.
I will say in this discussion, you know, what she was talking about, the data that I mentioned earlier do seem to support what she was saying in that discussion.
You know, that the people who could not answer correctly on, you know, questions of fact and then also said they were voting for Trump, that isn't an area where you necessarily would lie.
Those were just fact-based questions.
Yeah.
So I, if I had to answer, and I recognize as a middle-aged, middle-class white man, okay, if I had to answer, I think it leans much more heavily on what she was saying than on racism.
But he's also right.
Maybe I don't want to believe that.
Maybe I don't want to believe.
I do think that there are some people, some people I know, who, yeah, you know, they will never vote for a person of color.
So it's hard to say.
I think it leans more towards the low-information voter than racism and sexism.
And part of that is we did elect Obama.
So the racism aspect, I'm not saying racism has been cured by any means, but, you know, it did happen twice.
Yeah.
The sexism issue, that's still out there.
We saw it with Hillary.
We've just seen it again.
So I don't know.
They decided to vote for the orange candidate instead.
Well, we did say specifically on this podcast that, or maybe I said it.
I don't know.
I can't remember.
But the last time we had an election update was after the presidential debate between Harris and Trump, where it was the biggest moment from that was Ohio and Clayton.
You're eating the dogs.
You're eating the dogs.
Eating the cats.
Yeah.
I said specifically on here that this is where this campaign is going.
It's going toward fear and hatred.
I mean, that's all that's been there.
That's been their modus operator.
I think I said, but that's been doing that forever.
That's where it's, that's exactly where it went.
But I don't know that that.
So.
Yeah.
Okay.
So you're right.
But was that this sounds like it's splitting hairs?
Was that racism against Harris or was that racism against Latinos and immigrants in general?
I think there was definitely a lot of racism against immigrants, especially Latino immigrants.
Okay.
I think there was a ton of that because that was the biggest fear-mongering.
You know, like we said, they called Puerto Rico garbage.
And that's not even immigrants.
They're U.S. citizens.
There's a lot of people who don't even know that the people of Puerto Rico are U.S. citizens.
Oh, there's many.
Yes.
But the point is that I don't think Trump knows that.
The point is, yes, there was racism inherent in those accusations and the fear-mongering about immigration, which is a little bit different than saying I won't vote for the candidate who is black and Asian.
True.
True.
But I think they're all factors.
Yeah, I think they're all adding up to something.
I think that the real view of the U.s electorate is that it is uh, it's, it's not progressive enough to support the high in the sky notions that we feel should be true and and good in the world.
It's uh um, it's not there.
Yeah, and it's sad, you know, and it's terrible and it's stupid, but it's.
That's the real thing.
That's true here is that if you have the wrong candidate and you lose, there'll be a terrible outcome, and I think we're gonna see a terrible outcome now.
Yeah, you know, and that's.
We've already done two hours and a bit of this.
We don't need to go into all the things we think are going to be terrible.
Uh right, I do want to say, you know, I saw quotes uh, Mark Cuban and Michael Bloomberg no relation.
Uh, both said Trump won.
Quote, fair and square.
So it's time to move forward now.
First, I would ask, is it really fair and square to win by doing literally nothing but lying, just making shit up and plastering the airwaves and the twitter waves and everything else with it?
Is that fair and square?
Well, I guess it wasn't illegal uh, so if you're looking at it from that perspective sure, fair and square um, but boy it sure is nice for a couple of you know, white billionaires to be so nonchalant about how.
Oh well, it's time to move forward.
Oh yes, because it's really going to affect your lives.
They'll be fine.
Yeah yeah, the uh.
The only demographics that were nearly completely unchanged were uh, black men and black women were very close to I think it was something like 89 of black men voted for Harris and 92 of black women voted for Harris.
That's virtually unchanged from 2020 and the votes for Biden, I believe.
Jewish men and women also.
Oh maybe actually, the numbers I saw didn't split out that way.
They didn't have.
Uh yeah, I didn't see a complete of all the many different varieties of.
I also didn't see one of of Asian people.
I, I hadn't seen that one.
I I looked at a more simpler set of demographics but uh, you know that's.
I mean that there was a time a couple months ago where Barack Obama was coming out to to stump for Paris and he was angry at the black men for for having any kind of support for Trump and uh, there was some black men saying well, how dare he?
Blah blah blah, blah.
And I don't know what was going on there.
I think that uh, I don't think that there was ever any danger in in any significant number of it's the squeaky wheel.
In that case, there's always going to be a few, you know, I mean you, there's always going to be your Clarence, Thomas.
For some reason they had a fear that there was some kind of swing some way.
Someone said that and I went, I don't, it really is that I, I don't.
Are you sure I don't.
Maybe you have some reason to think that, but I haven't seen it so, like I don't.
It's really weird that you think that's true.
I know Trump said that that was true, but why do you believe him?
That's a really weird time to start believing Trump is when he claims that you know, it's like believing that his crowd size was actually the largest crowd size.
Like what what, why?
Yeah like, why are you reacting to that?
Where are you believing that it doesn't matter?
Support abortion rights.
Yeah, you know um yeah uh, you know I, I don't know what to say uh, But really, I think that something prevented people from coming out.
And this is the new thing.
We're not going to spend a lot of time on this, but I want to introduce it because this is going to be something new, two hours and 15 minutes in.
Yeah, I know.
It's because it's going to be something we're going to have to talk about eventually.
And so this is how we're closing out the podcast is with this.
Okay.
So this is one of many voices who are pushing this, but they're all very similar to exactly this.
And this kind of puts this set of ideas succinctly.
So here it is.
So the guy who cheated on all of his wives, cheated on all of his taxes, cheated and defrauded the American people through all of his businesses, can't even form and run a nonprofit in the state of New York because he defrauded the public.
A guy who constantly defrauds and cheats in the most consequential event of his entire public life, you're telling me that everybody is 100% confident that he didn't cheat.
All of the people from his first administration who helped him get into office got charged and prosecuted and jailed for being conspirators with Russia.
We already litigated this.
He is a fraud and a cheat.
Why are we accepting that the outcome of this election is completely okay?
Everything we know about how fascist authoritarians rise to power tells us that something is wrong.
The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.
Yeah, here's the problem with that.
He's the party right now.
I know.
Because there is no one asking everyone to reject the evidence of eyes and ears.
Yeah.
And he's distorting.
He's using a quote from the book 1984 that I have used on this podcast to justify a lack of belief in the thing that's right in front of him and in front of everyone.
All he's saying is Trump is a cheater, so therefore he must have cheated this time.
Except Trump wasn't controlling this.
You know, when Trump defrauded the government, what the government had to prove was that he was in control of the actions that defrauded them.
When Trump bought, you know, tried to basically bribed Stormy Daniels, they had to prove that he was signing the checks, that he knew what he was, what was happening here.
Okay.
Trump does not control the election offices.
You said it earlier.
Those are all controlled by state officials and they all do it slightly differently.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You wouldn't have to do that.
The state has many, many polling stations.
They have witnesses at each one for both parties, sometimes for more than one party because in some cases there's Jill Stein people who are also witnessing everything and they're there when they're counting the votes.
They're watching them count the votes.
That's what those witnesses are there for.
They're watching everything.
And when there's the votes in a particular precinct are within a certain amount, they have a right to call for a recount on that stack or whatever.
And they duly do that.
And they make sure that all the votes are there and they're what they say they are.
And like, what does he think, like, he cheated?
Like, in what way?
Like, what?
Yeah, this is what I mean.
They will claim a thing, but not say anything about how they think that cheating might have occurred.
And once you ask that question, that's when they imagine something.
I mean, this is exactly what happened with the Republicans.
They imagined a way in which the Democrats might have cheated to make Biden president.
And they imagined that there was the votes, the vote machines were flipping in some way that was whatever.
And it turned out to be not true.
They proved it.
They lost an $800 million lawsuit Fox lost to voting company.
And if they could have proved it, they would have to save that $800 million.
You better believe they would have.
Right.
But that's not reality.
That's not what we're seeing.
But this is a big, this is going to be a big thing.
This is going to be a big push is people on the left who want to believe that this was faked, that this was.
I don't think it will be.
This is going to be a thing we're going to have to talk about again because there's going to be, I'm sure of it, there's going to be people that do this.
Oh, there will be people, but I think it will be relegated to the same people who believed in the staged thing.
I mean, yeah, we picked out some big accounts.
Yeah.
And we said, but did it ever gain any real traction?
No.
It never did outside of our Twitter bubble.
And I don't think this will either.
Because I even saw like some larger liberal accounts being like, well, I'm glad at least they're not, you know, we don't have people on our side claiming this.
And, you know, obviously they didn't see someone like that guy that you just quoted.
But it's the same exact, it's the same exact conspiracy.
You could just substitute staged assassination attempt for changing the, you know, for cheating in the election.
I feel like it was something he would do.
Don't get me wrong.
That's right.
That's, that is exactly what they said about the stage thing.
I feel like it's a thing he would do, but is not proof of him doing it.
Right.
Do I think Trump would have cheated if he could have?
I think he was ready to.
We were ready to call him on it.
We had, there was me and a hundred other podcasters at least that were calling this and pointing out the way in which we thought he was going to pull some stuff.
And then it turned out he didn't need to.
Right.
Now, some of the things that they did, they, you know, they tried to suppress the votes.
They did it in quote unquote legal ways.
Yeah.
You know, like striking people off of the registration rolls.
Yeah.
Especially like in one state, I think it was Virginia, where they did it in under 90 days, which is not supposed to do to, yeah, right.
And in, you know, Russian-led bomb threats at primarily minority voting precincts.
Yeah.
But, you know what?
That doesn't cover it.
I'm sorry.
And that's.
That didn't suppress 11 million votes.
No.
And so I understand you're, you know, we're upset.
That doesn't mean there was a conspiracy.
Right.
Yeah.
You need some proof.
Feelings aren't enough.
Give me evidence.
Yeah.
If you think there's something hinky and then you look at what you think is hinky and then you can show by looking what the evidence is, like every murder investigation starts with a suspicion.
Yeah.
But the suspicion is supposed to lead to looking for evidence.
And then if you don't find the evidence, that's supposed to be the end of the investigation.
You can look until you find evidence and then only once you find evidence can you really bring an accusation.
And before that, you have nothing because you have no evidence.
Yeah.
So, so we're not going to spend a lot of time talking about it because I'm sure it's going to come up again and we're going to have a chance to talk about it again.
If it doesn't come up, then it's not.
It won't.
I hope that they will be shut down.
We have, in my field, David, we have an expression since we're swearing on this podcast.
Yes.
You can hope in one hand and shit in the other hand and figure out which one fills up first.
Yes.
That's how it works.
Oh, I know.
There's a lot of people who are bringing this up in the last couple of days right since then.
These votes are missing and there's something shenanigans and Trump is always pulling these things.
And yeah, Trump is always cheating at something, but there's no evidence of him cheating at this because he had no access to the number of things he would need to have access to to change this in this way.
Especially since some of those are like, you know, like Wisconsin, Michigan.
Those are states with Democratic governors.
Yeah.
You know, those are states with, you know, did he just go into the Republican counties and Republican precincts and controlled, you know, the ones that controlled them somehow get rid of the Democrat votes there and this added up.
It makes no sense.
It is like any other conspiracy that would involve such a huge number of people.
Someone always talks.
Yeah.
We would have heard about it.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
There's, and there's, if this goes much further, there's going to be some people who try to cash in and say, I saw something or I, you know, which, which is where it went last time with the Republicans who would start to sign affidavits.
I saw a van pull up and pull out a box of votes and bring them in.
And they were all written on their Kamala.
And it's like, well, how did you see it if the box was sealed?
Like, doesn't, you know, none of it made sense.
And I hope it dies an early death, but I'm worried that it doesn't.
And so I just wanted to put a pin in that.
If we need to talk about it later, we noticed it now.
We get the points.
All right.
That's how it works, David.
Yes.
Yes.
We get the points for mentioning it now.
So, okay.
All right.
We're going to sign off here.
There, I had a bunch of notes about Trump's legal stuff, but it mostly just amounts to he's in no legal jeopardy, really.
Not anymore.
Not now that he won.
Not realistically.
So, I mean, even the cases that are ongoing, the Supreme Court's going to rule they can't do anything to him for the next four years.
Yeah, it'll be postponed until after he's no longer president at the very least.
Yeah.
Even the sentencing, there's a sentencing hearing in late November.
It'll either get delayed or it'll get quashed.
Yeah.
There's really only two ways that happens.
So with that, signing off, where can people find you, David?
Well, they can find me on my link tree, which is linktree slash David Bloomberg with a dot before the EE in the URL.
I mostly spend time on Twitter where I'm at David Bloomberg, but ever since the election, there has been a mass migration away.
Yeah, yeah.
I have seen my Twitter follower numbers drop, and it is not because I piss them off any more than I usually do.
It's unlikely that it was just bots.
Right.
Some people say it's all the bots on following people.
No, it's not.
Because I know this because my numbers on Blue Sky in particular have skyrocketed.
I mean, they have almost, as of right now, they've almost tripled.
Now, admittedly, I didn't have a whole lot.
So tripling is easy.
But my numbers on threads also went up.
Not as much as Blue Sky.
Community that I mostly interact with, which is the reality TV community, they somehow made a decision to mostly go to Blue Sky.
And I think it helps that Blue Sky is known as more of a liberal haven.
Maybe you'll find more liberals fighting with liberals on Blue Sky than you will find liberals fighting with conservatives.
You know, which may be worse.
So I will keep my flag planted for now in all of them.
You know, I know that there was a tweet from a, I'm blanking on his name.
He has truth in his name.
But it's not the real truther, is it?
Yes, the real truther, I believe, was the one who tweeted it and said, you know, I have been here fighting against, you know, all these things.
I know Elon is horrible.
I know this place is horrible, but it is still the biggest location for people to get information and misinformation.
And therefore, I will stay here to keep fighting it.
I will be on Twitter for a while still, as long as it is still a place that, you know, I can handle, as long as I still have, you know, a number of people there that I interact with.
I feel similarly.
I will, you know, continue to fight the good fight there for the foreseeable future.
But I will try to spend more time on Blue Sky and on threads.
And on Threads, I'm at David Bloomberg TV because that's also what I am on Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok, where I don't do any politics in the video ones because the algorithm kills you if you split your topics.
So it's all reality TV there.
You know, I know there are arguments against Twitter.
I know that they say, you know, you're contributing to Elon Musk.
Elon Musk is the richest man in the world.
The pennies that he gets from me are, you know, for putting ads by me.
From a moral standpoint, I understand it.
I, you know, I will not buy a blue check from him.
I know people who have.
I know some who are giving it up now because it's kind of like the trolley problem.
You know, it's like, okay, if I'm giving him money one way, what's the difference between that and giving him money the other way?
Well, one is passive and one is active.
And so, you know, I'm certainly not passing huge judgment against anyone who does it because I know it helps spread messaging.
But, you know, that's where we are right now.
That was a long answer to your question of where people can find me.
Yeah.
Well, I'm going to have to spend a bit more time on Blue Sky as well.
My follower account also skyrocketed in the last few days there.
Blue skyrocketed.
Sure.
Yeah.
Blue sky.
Yes.
Yeah.
That's really good.
Yeah.
Blue skyrocketed.
Everyone's blue skyrocketing these days.
And so I'm at Spencer G. Watson on Twitter.
I'm at Spencer Watson on Blue Sky.
I am starting some measure of organization to push back against disinformation.
It's still in the initial stages of forming, and everyone's wondering what we're going to do.
I have some ideas.
I have to run a past people.
There's all kinds of things that we don't know yet, but I'm starting one.
If anyone hears this and wants to be a part of that, they can get a hold of me in one of those places or just email the podcast.
It's fine.
I don't think I was invited.
I consider this an invitation, David.
I've been meaning to talk to you and I knew I was going to.
So yeah.
Yeah.
So right now that's where that is.
I'm also starting, we'll see how it goes, a podcast alliance of podcasts that push back against disinformation.
And we'll see how that goes too.
Yeah.
I don't know.
I don't know exactly how much difference we can make.
And I don't know what we'll do exactly.
But I feel like this disinformation problem is going to get worse.
Yeah.
I mean, it's going to be coming from government agencies now.
And I think that there's going to be a lot less pushback from government agencies to people like Elon Musk just relentlessly changing things.