The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - The US Election Is Four Weeks Today, Why Is The Race So Close?

Episode Date: October 8, 2024

Less than a month to go now but the race between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump remains a toss-up. Why is it so close?

And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. You're just moments away from the latest episode of The Bridge. Four weeks today, the Americans pick their next president. Why is the race so close? And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. Welcome to Tuesday. A month from now, four weeks today, in fact, Americans go to the polls. And it has been a remarkable year on the U.S. presidential race. You know, so many different twists and turns, And yet here we are with four weeks to go. And if you believe the majority of the polls, the race is basically tied.

It is so close. And then you look at the candidates and you say, why is that? Like, why is it so close? We're going to try and delve into that question today with my friend, my colleague, Keith Bogue. Keith, who was the chief political correspondent for the CBC when he was based in Ottawa, and he was sort of the chief U.S. watcher when he was based in Washington. And he covered Obama.

He covered Trump. And he has a fascination with U.S. politics, which is good for us because he has lots of thoughts on this current race as well as past races. But he also is not afraid to say, you know what, I don't know. I don't understand this or that or whatever it may be. And you'll hear him grapple with, you know, some of the questions, trying to determine where he really sits on them. And that's good. I love that. And I think viewers and listeners love that as well,

to see that somebody doesn't have an automatic answer to everything and likes to work his way, in his case, in Keith's case, work his way through trying to develop an answer. Anyway, we'll get to Keith in a minute, who throughout this year has been with us from the early part of 2024 and the primaries and all of that right up to today, dropping in every month or so to give us a chat. So here's probably our second last chat with Keith before the election.

With four weeks to go, it's an interesting discussion to have. Okay, a little, what do we call it? A little housework to do here before we get to the conversation on the U.S. election, and that is to give you a sense of where things are going the rest of the week. Tomorrow is our Encore Wednesday, so that's pretty clear. I think we're going to run the interview tomorrow about Pierre Poliev, the book, the recent book that has been written. We'll talk to the author about what he sees on Pierre Poliev.

Thursday is your turn, and your turn, you know, bounces back and forth some weeks, like last week. It's, you know, kind of what's on your mind, plus the random renter, of course. And other times we put forward a specific question, and this is one of those times. So the question, we announced it yesterday, and there have already been some interesting answers.

Usually people take some time to think through the question, and I expect the big rush of answers to come in later today and tomorrow. The deadline is tomorrow, Wednesday, at 6 p.m. Eastern Time. Here's the question. What Canadian in history would you like to have a long conversation with? So that's any Canadian in history. And the country's history, you know, officially dates back to July 1st, 1867.

But you can go back further than that if you want. Anybody who we can kind of classify as Canadian, in other words, they had something to do with Canada, right? Before the actual description of Canadian came into being in 1867. Anyway, any Canadian in history who you'd like to have a long conversation with. So I want to know who that person is

and why you'd want to talk to them. And once again, keep your answers brief, paragraph at most. There's already been a couple come in that are like 10, 12 paragraphs. That's not going to happen. Sorry. There's just, you know, every time you do that, you cut out another half a dozen people. So keep it that way.

Send it to themansbridgepodcast at gmail.com. themansbridgepodcast at gmail.com. And include your name and the location you're writing from. So you've got some time to do that. I look forward to receiving some of your answers. It'll be fun. Okay, let's get to our conversation with Keith Bogue. Lots happening on the U.S. election.

So let's get the master in here and find out where he thinks things stand. Enjoy. All right, Keith, let's start with your basic lay of the land. Where do you see things now, basically a month out from election day? Pretty much where I thought they were going to be, which is a very tight race that I wouldn't want to bet money on right now under any circumstances. It could go either way. And that's in spite of the fact that there was so much excitement about Kamala Harris topping the ticket after Joe Biden stepped out of the race. And we did see a big surge of enthusiasm from her. She recovered in the polls. She caught up to Trump. At points, she passed him. And I mean, in aggregate polls right now, she seems slightly ahead of him, but she stalled. And

we don't know why for sure, but I think one of the obvious explanations is that the polarization of American politics is just impermeable. And it doesn't matter whether you're Kamala Harris and not Joe Biden at all. That's just the way it is. And I think it's likely to stay that way. Unless we get some unimaginable, unknown, unknown October surprise, you know, we would just have to see how that turns out. But I think in four weeks on election night, we're going to be sweating it out. It's going to be very tight. And the edge

that Republicans have now is the same edge they had four years ago and eight years ago. The Electoral College has a slight Republican bias towards them. They don't need to do as well in the popular vote to win the White House. Kamala Harris has to beat them by at least a couple of points, maybe three, to have the same chance of being in the White House. I have sensed, as you suggest, it seems like she stalled a little bit in the last couple of weeks. I do sense, listening to Democrats, a nervousness about the position they feel they're in right now. I think that's true, and I think there are other things that are contributing to that, that they are aware of, that many of us who are not paying as close attention are not.

In Georgia, for instance, they're fighting back legally against changes that are being made to the county boards that control elections there that have accrued from themselves more power to delay vote counts and possibly delay the result of the election happening in other states. I think they understand that this means that they're up against a very tough fight, not just going into the election, but possibly coming out the other end of it as well. But on the face of it, when you look at what's going on, there seems to be no reason why they would be facing a tough fight. I mean, you've got this crazy man on the other side with some of the things that he's been saying of late. If we're kind of used to him lying uh that's kind of normal for trump but some of the other

stuff uh the the violent stuff the vicious stuff um and yet he's he he's he's holding his base obviously but he's holding more than his base, if he's basically tied with her. On the weekend, he suggested, not for the first time, that the assassination, the first assassination attempt, was in some way perpetrated by Democrats. And a lot of those people are going to believe that because he says it. That kind of incitement has got to be very motivating to some people. I mean, imagine if you thought that were true. I mean, clearly it is not true. But if your media sources are reinforcing that, if the leader of the party that you are supporting and the leader you revere is

saying that, what impact does that kind of thing have on your thinking about the overall frame? You hear all kinds of evidence from the other side that suggests that it's Donald Trump who is inciting violence, who's calling for violence, and even calling for it against his political enemies. But when he tells you that they tried to have him killed possibly twice, he's not sure about this, he says, but he wants you to think about it. Well, what can possibly be the result of that? It would be the result that he intends, which is for you to see that your political enemies are using violence against your leader.

This is such a horrible, horrible aspect that Trump has brought to politics, but you can't discount or dismiss, I think, the possibility that it's effective and that it does a lot to contribute to the polarization and the different views of reality that the two political sides have in this. And that's only one example of the kinds of things, of the impact that the kinds of things he says could be happening in voters' minds. You know, there was a time where we assumed that members of his party were going to speak out at some point. We assumed this in 2016. We assumed it in 2020. We assumed it again this time in 2024.

Now, it never really happened in the first two. It has kind of happened this time around. Not in huge numbers, but significant numbers and significant people. And yet, it doesn't seem to be having an impact once again. How do you square that when you look at this? Well, can I give you two conflicting answers? Sure. One is, again, the polarization that I mentioned earlier. People are deeply dug into their silos, deeply invested in opinions that developed and decisions that formed in their minds long, long ago.

And they're reluctant to change those things, as we all are. It's human nature. Whether among the fairly large number of undecided people, right, like one in six voters is said to be undecided. Whether those people who are claiming to be undecided now are really in the middle of a journey from Trump to Harris. That it's a stopping off point. That they don't, it's not like turning a light switch on or off. It is a process whereby they disengage from Trump for whatever reasons, and they decide what are they going to do next. In one of the pieces that I wrote, I mentioned Bret Stephens in the New York Times. I don't admire his position at all, but he is trying to be the embodiment of the person who

has decided that they're not going to vote for Donald Trump, but has not yet got so far as saying he will vote for Kamala Harris. And it may all be just a pose. It may be just an attention-getting device, but it may also reflect something that's real in people's minds, that this is how they get to Harris. It isn't direct, it isn't immediate, but it's a process and they're in the middle of it now. I would like to think that's true. It's an idea that I think has some merit to it, but we don't know. Who does Trump listen to? At the end of the day, I think there's enough evidence now that unless he hears what he wants to hear, he only listens to himself. But one of the things that I noticed in going through the documents that were released last week in the Trump

insurrection case that is in the DC court, meaning it's being handled by Jack Smith, the special prosecutor. In reading through that, you see lots of people telling him stuff about the election that he doesn't want to believe. I mean, dozens and dozens of people who are telling him you lost, who are telling him that the fraudulent evidence that you think we're going to find there doesn't exist, that what you say is untrue. And he discards all of them. But he doesn't discard Steve Bannon.

He doesn't discard Rudy Giuliano. Why? Because they tell him what he wants to hear. And that seems to be the only thing that matters. The idea that there is some persuasive voice who can turn his mind in another direction, I think is false. He will believe what he wants to believe, and he will surround himself with people who tell him what he wants to believe, and then he will just move in that direction no matter what. This is the ultimate danger of another Trump presidency, by the way. That is the absence of guardrails, of reasonable people telling you what the truth is,

and making sure you don't violate the norms, break the law, and so on. That existed in the first Trump administration, but it's not going to exist in another Trump administration. Those guardrails will be gone. You know, you mentioned Bannon's name, and of course Bannon's in jail right now. It comes out, what, a couple of days before the election. Yeah. I don't imagine there's any reason why he couldn't be talking to Trump or getting messaging through to Trump,

because a lot of what Trump's doing right now is very Bannon-ish. I mean, it sounds like the kind of stuff he'd be saying on his podcast if he was not in jail. Yeah, I think you're right about that. I mean, it's not impossible to communicate from prison if you want to.

I don't think it even takes special effort. I think that, that you, that you, that you have a right to speak as an inmate to your visitors and people who want to make contact with you, to reporters if you choose to, and if one of them is the former president of the United States who wants to talk to you, I'm pretty sure you can do that too. The thing though, is that Trump is so dependent upon immediate reaction to having people physically around him,

that I think it does harm him not to have Bannon at his side as the kind of quick thinker who can react to every situation that he faces in real time. I think he misses that. But the idea that he's not in his head at all, I agree with you. He's there somewhere. You would think from watching the Trump campaign over the last few weeks, it seemed like he had a not bad weekend this past weekend. Crowd sizes at least were up for him. But he had a lot of things go wrong in the last few weeks. And he kept saying,

my people are telling me to do this. I'm not going to do it. I'm going to do my thing. And you don't know whether that's all part of the act or whatever, but nothing seemed to be working except his numbers didn't crater. Yeah. So I think that probably Trump is right and that he understands his base and needs to speak to them. And those who think that elections are always about addition and want to reach out with a message

to persuade others don't understand that his understanding of addition is you get more and more people who think just like I do, that I don't reach out to people who disagree with me. I'm tired of that, not interested in it. I don't wear it well. It's like a suit that doesn't fit for me and I'm not going to do it. And you see that he even mocks them in some of his speeches when he said, oh, you know, that's what they tell me that I should be saying and it's all I put it. Then he just goes off on all on his own tangents. But I think people love it. And I think that the, the election is going to be largely about turnout. And I think that, you know, I think his experience tells him that there is a reason to believe that there are more

people out there who haven't voted for me yet, who I can get to the polls this time, if I can just get them worked up enough. And he's got a lot of ways to work them up, whether it's the prosecutions that he's faced over the last year, whether it's the assassination attempts against his life, whether it's the things he just says about Democrats. He's not about improving their minds. He's about working them up. That's what he does best and he knows it. And that's what he intends to do, I think, for the next four weeks to try and get

more people to the ballot box. But ultimately, the thing I never forget is that he has a plan for if he loses again, just like he did plan last time. So all of this is going on in his fevered mind all the time. But one assumes it would have to be close if he loses for him to actually, you know, exercise that plan. Yes. But close where? Close in the national vote? No. Close in a few states. That's all it takes. Right. That's why I worry so much about Georgia. Georgia seems to me to be,

to be a state that is most vulnerable at this moment to having outside forces influence the reporting of ballots and so on. And just as an aside, I'm encouraged to see that Kamala Harris is doing better in Pennsylvania, because with Pennsylvania, she probably doesn't need Georgia. And I think in Pennsylvania, the vote is probably easier to protect against Republicans. It's not, I mean, it's not a slam dunk. They're at work in every swing state. But Georgia seems to be the place that people are focusing on, because that's where they might

be most effective. Okay, I'm going to get to Harris in a moment. But I just want to stay on Trump for a second, because it remains one of the great mysteries to me in trying to understand U.S. politics and in particular Trump politics. So here's the other question. I mean, I get it. I understand it with the base. I'm still not sure how much of his vote is represented by his base. But anyway, let's just say I understand the base. I'm still not sure how much of his vote is represented by his base. But anyway, let's just say I understand the base. Does the Republican Party as a party want Trump to win? I think mostly it does, because I think that the debate about what the party was going to be, what its future was, ended in 2016.

And I think that they understand that what has happened to the Republican Party is similar to what's happened to conservative parties in other countries, which is that they are trying to find ways to appeal to a new base. A mild way of putting it is that the Republican Party that used to be the party of Wall Street or Bay Street is now, depending for its survival, on becoming the party of Main Street. A lot of those Republicans, call them club republicans if you want to don't know how to talk to those people and trump does so i think that they need trump and i think that they know that he has one of the keys to their success in future um i think what is interesting is how people are reacting to J.D. Vance, because I think there's an investment in Vance that is being made on the understanding that he, too, knows how to talk to them, but that he also knows how to talk to a wider audience that trump doesn't know and so i guess part of my answer would be yes they do want trump to win because i think they lead they believe trump leads to a let's say advanced like future which is politically successful but more mentally stable and more conservatively true?

I think it's a really good question. I'll give it some more thought, but I think I stand by what I've said to this moment, and I don't know that I want to step out too far without taking some more. No, but what you're saying makes a lot of sense. And a lot of it is hinged on Vance, which is interesting because a month ago, the feeling was, God, if you could make that choice again, you need to pick somebody else. That Vance was a problem.

Doesn't seem that way today. It seems less that way today, for sure. Because what we thought we saw at the time was Trump and Vance defining the party along the lines of its vulnerabilities so that the advantages that Harris and Waltz had, particularly around issues like women's reproductive rights, were going to win the day. In a race that's tighter than it was, I still don't know that Vance was the right pick for this moment. But I noticed that the performance we saw from Vance last week was a much more marketable one than I had expected

from him. And I think that's what they believe their real bargain was to get that guy in front of people as the sensible, mentally stable, reasonable, calm, articulate guy that Trump is not. And I think that's useful for the future. So I see in Vance now a possibility that he can bring a lot of people together who would be uncomfortable with Trump. And in that group are the social conservatives, the evangelicals. I don't know about the economic conservatives. I'd like to think about that some more. But I think that Vance has demonstrated that he has some of the qualities that appeal to a certain kind of new conservative. Okay. We're going to take a quick break, and then we're going to come back and talk about where things stand at the moment for Kamala Harris

and the team around here. We'll do that right after this. And welcome back. You're listening to The Bridge, the Tuesday episode. Keith Bogue is with us. Keith's in Ottawa today. Former chief political correspondent to CBC in Ottawa, former Washington correspondent for the CBC in Ottawa and a variety of other places.

Keith has a passion for politics of all kinds, but especially so for U.S. politics. And he's been guiding us and helping us try to understand this race that's been going on in the States all year. And we're getting close to the end. Okay, we talked about Trump. Let's talk about Harris. Because as we've suggested earlier, there seems to be a sense that things have stalled for the Democrats in the last week or two. And there's a sense when you watch certain Democrats on the air that they're a little antsy about where things may stand,

especially so in the swing states, which it seems to determine this race. Here's my question, though. Does Harris and do the people around her, not that we see them often, but occasionally we do, do they seem edgy? Do they seem nervous? Or are they kind of focused? I think there's some truth to their reported hesitancy to put her out for interviews

and media scrums now we're seeing that she is loosening up about that that she's you know she's got a 60 minutes interview she sat down with others but they still seem to be protective of her to me and there has to be a reason for that i think that she has shown more skills than anyone really imagined as a campaigner with you know with retail political skills she is less she has less she has done less to improve the impression of her on issues and on their content the vulnerabilities that she began with continue to exist on a policy basis. I think everyone agreed that the border and immigration were difficult ones for her. And I don't know how much attention you, I don't know how much opportunity you get

to see the media campaign against her, but it is brutal. And it is relentlessly focused on that issue and it's effective because when i see it i just go wow i mean that like that is that is really tough she's a black woman you know i think that's still a really tough thing in America, I'll tell you. I remember when, I guess it was 2012, I was in Florida and that was Romney versus Obama. And I was in Florida and talking to the large Puerto Rican community, enlarging because they were moving there from Puerto Rico for a variety of reasons. And I remember I spoke to one of them and he was an undecided voter and his difficulty was that he couldn't vote for Trump because Trump is a racist

and he couldn't vote for Clinton because Clinton's a woman. And I use that because it's kind of an entertaining thing, but it makes you think right um i think i think that people have that um whether they would articulate it as clearly as that person did probably not but when you look at focus groups they take all the kinds of typically sexist shots at her that we've grown to expect that she's not up to this job that that she's not tough enough, that she's not smart enough, that she doesn't, you know, all these kinds of things as though, you know, like obviously Trump is not smart enough, not tough enough. It just doesn't matter. But I think it matters more for her because she's a woman. And, and I think that if she loses, we'll see a lot more, we'll see a lot more analysis of that part of it.

Hate to say all that. Yeah, no, and it's hard to say. And you kind of wonder whether it's not being said enough on American television, their journals, whether they're sort of skating around some of this stuff that, you know, there was the talk about the scene washing of, you know, Trump stuff. Yeah. But this is like issue scene washing. You know, if that's what's really happening at ground level, why aren't we talking about it? Trump always tells you what he's thinking, right?

And the number of times that when he attacks her, he attacks her on the basis of her intelligence, I think outweighs every other attack on her, even his attacks on her because of the border. I think he is much more likely comfortable and sees it as more effective to question her intelligence and call her a dummy. And he's been doing that since the beginning. If you're David Plouffe, who was the kind of the brains behind the Obama successes. He was brought in right away for Kamala Harris and is up there at the top of that organization, the campaign organization. What are you saying to her right now about how she should be, how and what she should be delivering upon

at this point in the campaign. What is it? How do you counter that stuff? So I don't pretend to be David Plouffe, who I think is one of the really sharpest political minds we've seen for a while. Right. What I do notice though,

is that we are, I think we're through that period of the campaign where the question was, who is Kamala Harris? And I think she provided it. She gave you the answers to that. She gave you the biographical information. We met her husband through the convention. He talked about dating. He talked about their family. She's talked about her career and about her early life as a child and as a teenager growing up. We filled in that picture. And I think that the questions people might have remaining really do have to do with what does she think about issues and difficult questions.

When she says that she may have changed her mind on an issue, but she's never changed her values, it's a great line, but she's got to say what it means, right? It can be a great line and still be undefined. And I think in her case that it is. I think that she needs to really do a better job on the border question than she has, maybe it's not possible because, you know, the Democrats have not come around to that issue as quickly as they might have. And they clearly have not dealt with it, whether that's because they've been thwarted, and you can make that argument, because they did support a championed legislation in Congress that was put aside because Trump didn't want them solving that issue. The reality is that that's not how voters experience it.

And I think she needs to find a way to show that she really gets it and that she has a sense of how to do something with it. Some of the things we talked about earlier are things that she cannot change. They are who she is. And I don't think, therefore therefore that there's a political prescription for all of the challenges that she faces. Probably the thing that David Plouffe knows better than we do is who does she need to talk to now when she's on this dump? Like, what is the message? What is the swing state message that's going to change like just a

few thousand minds because in the end peter i think that's what it's going to come down to a handful of states and a few thousand votes um she will win again the national popular vote handily but she could lose this she could lose this by 40,000 votes in three or four states. That's kind of like, you know, what's the ballot question, right? What are you going into the booth thinking about? And if you're targeting, you know, if you're probably targeting that group, that relatively small group out of a country of, you know, 350 million, 200 million or so voting.

If you're targeting that group, so you look at what's the ballot question, you go, well, you know, you could say the ballot question is immigration. You could say it's women's rights. You could say it's abortion. You could say there are a number of things you could say it is but surely at the end of the day the ballot question is trump or not trump that's what we think it should be i mean that's clearly what we think it should be right you and i and and people who understand what happened in 2020 on January 6th and understand that that scenario won't repeat itself because they will have figured out a better way of accomplishing their ends. And I've never, I can't even imagine a case

when it's been clearer that someone should not be anywhere near the Oval Office than the example of Trump has been. What does it take? But we've got to this point in October 2024, where we know that that's not a persuasive argument to a huge number of voters in the United States. So what are we supposed to do about that? And I watch, you know, I watch Fox News. And, I mean, they clearly don't care about that. And they're the largest, they have the largest cable audience in the US. And it's not that they have all those viewers, because, you know, cable audiences are not

by definition significant, but they have that influence over other media and so on. And they're not even talking about this. You know, they treat the fact of January 6th and the insurrection there and Democrats talking about those facts as Democrats trying to incite violence. I mean, that's absurd to suggest that the Democrats cannot talk about the real images that everybody saw on television, the facts as outlined in the indictments against him. And you know, he has not been tried, but we can read. We know what people will testify to, and some of it we saw on television. It's clear who this man is. It's absolutely crystal clear who he is. And yet, they cannot bring themselves to face that reality. Their political take is entirely reflexive this is what we do we're anti-democrat but

nothing else matters i don't know i find it i find it hard to i really find it hard to express myself on that anymore i mean i've been doing it for a long time now i don't understand why people can't see what is so obvious, so evident, and so frightening. Last questions about money. We've always said that what it comes down to in the end is how much money you got to run your campaign and do things like get out the vote. Well, if one goes simply by what's legal in the pot for each party, the Democrats seem to be way ahead on the money front. Is that going to make a difference? First of all, I think it's a good indication that people are taking this seriously and they want to win. It's a close race, but I mean, I have more reasons to believe

that people will surprise us in this election than I did in 2020, even though the polls don't reflect that. Let me just say something about where the model forecasters see this race. I know we started there and I didn't mention this. At about this time in 2020, Joe Biden had somewhere around an 80% chance of winning the election. The previous election, Hillary Clinton had somewhere around a 70% chance of winning the election and she lost. Right now, Kamala Harris has less than a 60% chance of winning the election. I find that scary. But I think the people putting their money where their mouth is are reading the situation correctly and they understand that it's a desperate time and that's a good thing.

I don't think money is that important when it comes to. Now, I may be wrong about this, and I'll tell you why. Normally, in a presidential race, everybody knows everything you need to know about the candidates, and you don't need to worry about name recognition and stuff like that that you might need to worry about in context down the ballot for Congress, even for Senate, and so on. Maybe in this case, it's different. There's enough that's undefined about Kamala Harris still that can be filled in by Republicans, and you need to combat against that. I think it's different. There's enough that's undefined about Kamala Harris still that can be filled in by Republicans and you need to combat against that. I think it's fortunate that they have a lot of money. Do I think it matters? We are where we are in this race. It's not a comfortable spot.

She can still lose it. So the answer then would be no, doesn't. The next time we hear from Keith on this program, it will be literally hours away from knowing, well, knowing that the polls have closed. It may be days away from knowing who won. It will be, yeah. Go ahead. But we'll see about that. We look forward to talking to you again, Keith.

You know, listen, it's a fascinating story. No matter how you feel about it, no matter who you want to win, it's a fascinating story to be watching, trying to understand, and to a degree covering, as we're doing here in our retirement. As we plod along and watch these things occur. Thanks for doing this. Look forward to talking to you again in roughly a month's time. Thanks for having me, Peter. Great to see you. You know, technically, Keith and I are retired, right?

We retired from our years at CBC. I was there, you know, 50 years. Keith was there, I'm not sure how many, but, you know, 35, 40, something like that. We retired and we're in retirement. However, in retirement, we're still working. I'm doing this podcast. I love doing it.

I love talking with you guys, sharing opinions. You share yours. I share mine. Keith shares his. It's not a newscast anymore. It's just two old guys talking, and we enjoy doing that. And Keith is still working in the sense that he's sharing his opinions on other programs as well. He does a lot of work with David Hurley, my friend David,

who's been on this program and I've been on his, his podcast, Hurley Burley and others, and his newsletter. So we're still out there and we're still enjoying our time. I should mention, I'm not going to go into detail yet. It's way too early, but I just signed a new deal for book number five. We'll be coming out probably until the fall of 26. It's got to be written first, and it'll be another one that I'm doing with my friend Mark Bulgich. Right?

Mark and I have already written a couple of books together, and this will be our third. So we're looking forward to doing that for Simon & Schuster. I'll tell you more about that. Maybe a year from now. But I think you'll find it interesting because you're kind of peripherally involved in this next book. Okay.

Time to wrap it up. Your turn. Thursday. Get your answers into the question, what Canadian in history would you like to sit down and have a long talk with? The Mansbridge Podcast at gmail.com. Have it in by 6 p.m. tomorrow, Eastern Time. Include your name, the location you're writing from,

and keep it to a paragraph or so. Not longer than that, please. It's not going to happen. All right. We will, well, tomorrow is Encore Edition, and we'll do that Polyev book, Encore from earlier this year. That's it for now.

I'm Peter Mansbridge. Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you again in almost 24 hours.