The Chaser Report - US Election Forecast: The End Is Nigh | David Smith

Episode Date: October 31, 2024

With just days to go until the US election, Dom Knight is joined for the final time by Associate Professor David Smith from the US Studies Centre at USYD, to give all his final thoughts and predictions on what will happen. And most importantly... who will reign supreme? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Chaser Report is recorded on Gadigal Land. Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence, this is the Chaser Report. Hello and welcome to the Chaser Report. A US election special once again, look, Kamala Harris turned up at the ellipse a couple of days ago, the place at which Donald Trump, of course, marshaled his supporters and told them to march on the Capitol and that he'd be right there with them. Spoiler alert, he was not right there with them. She went there to make her closing arguments, so to speak.

Dave Smith, Associate Professor, look, in a sense, is here to. make his closing argument to at least give us his read on how Kamala Harris went and whether or anyone gives us stuff about closing arguments delivered at Washington, D.C. Joe Biden's brief and unsuccessful re-entry into the race, Donald Trump's Madison Square Garden, the term hate fest has been used. Certainly a bizarre litany of speakers from Tucker Carlson to Rudy Giuliani and lots else besides. Both sides seem pretty bullish in this final stretch, which of them is right, if any. David, welcome back. Good to be back. Thank you for having me.

I know you're talking to everybody all the time at the moment, so thank you for squeezing us in. My pleasure. All right, not long till election day at all. The polls, if anything, seem to be even tighter to the extent that we can believe polls at all. Let's start with that after, just some ads just to sort of, you know, pay for some stuff. Yeah, certainly the New York Times aggregator is even closer than before, but I heard Rory Stewart from the rest of politics. The UK version earlier in the week, I saw him at the Opera House in Sydney, saying that the polls were all meaningless anyway, and he thought, Harris would very comfortably win everyone's taking a position. How do you read the numbers?

Look, my gut is silent about what the numbers actually mean. And that's because every new number I see doesn't clarify anything. It just adds to the confusion. And I think this reflects the fact this really is a 50-50 race. All of the poll results in most of the swing states are forming this very tight little pattern around the 50-50 mark. The kinds of leads that are imputing in the averages, like Harris by point two or Trump by point four, these really don't mean anything in terms of how they should affect the way that you look at the race. In fact, the way that I see it is, with polling this close, it's going to be determined by people's last minute decisions. There might not be that many undecided voters out there. When the polls are

this close, if they really are this close, then the race is going to be determined by people's last minute decisions to vote or not to vote or to vote for Harris or to vote for Trump. This is one of the few elections where the campaigns are really going to matter in terms of how they can drag people out to the polls. So we're going to see a very traditional Democratic Party operation versus a very newfangled kind of Republican operation, which has largely been outsourced to Elon Musk. We're looking at Republicans trying to get out young men in particular, a low propensity voting group, their theory is there are so many of these guys who don't vote who are Trump-minded. If we can just get some of them out, then we're going

to win. Harris's theory on the other hand is there's going to be a lot of conservative-minded people who are just fed up with Trump. She just needs to persuade them, either not to vote for Trump or to vote for her or to stay at home. So we won't know until election day who's got it right. You know, Rory Stewart could be right that Harris will win it easily. The betting market bros could be right that Trump went easily. Neither outcome would be very surprising at this point. It wouldn't even be surprising to see Trump win the popular vote, but lose the electoral college. Amazing enough, a reverse of some of the polls that has been happening. Of course, if Harris wins the popular vote and loses the electoral college, everyone's going to be like,

you know, here we go again. It would be really interesting, though, if that happened to Trump. In fact, there have even been people saying this could be our generation's best shot at getting rid of the electoral college. If Trump somehow manages to win the popular vote and lose the electoral college, all of a sudden, Republicans are going to be a lot more enthusiastic about getting rid of the electoral college. So I just think it's so close. I think it's going to be determined by factors that we can't currently see in the polls at the moment because it's things that are going to happen in the last few days. The greatest polling misses, or the most notorious polling misses in history were largely driven by voting decisions that people made

after the polls stopped happening. So the famous Dewey defeats Truman, which actually turned out to be Truman defeats Dewey. That's because back in those days, polling stopped two weeks before the election. These days, it stops about one week before the election. And back in 2016, it wasn't so much that the polls were getting it wrong right up until the moment that they stopped. It was more that a lot of people. didn't make up their minds until the last few days of the campaign. So, you know, the same thing

could happen again. And this is why I'm not going to make any predictions bullish or otherwise. Yeah. Look, a lot of the people who are saying Harris will prevail are basing that on the theory that women are more likely to vote than men and on the Democrat ground game, which we can talk a little bit about. But it's worth reminding everybody that voting in America is a fath, far more so than in Australia that there are no democracy sausages as compensation. The queues are ridiculously long. It's on a workday and it's cold. They have it on at a time of year where no one really wants to be queuing outside for a long time. That said, David, there has been an awful lot of early voting. And in the, is it 80 million or something like that? Massive amount of people have

actually voted already. So perhaps that will compensate for that. But the general observation that women are likely to come out and vote, that has been the basis of the closing argument really from Kamala Harris, particularly with Beyonce the other day, that it's about abortion, it's about women's bodies. And that that factor might be, as it was in several recent elections, the key difference. Yeah, that absolutely could be the key difference. And this is why when we see what looks like a symmetrical gender gap with Harris getting 55% of women and Trump getting 55% of men, it's not symmetrical because women do vote in these slightly higher numbers. And this, by the way, is why the Trump theory of the election is so important.

It's the idea that if we can just get that up to parity, if we can just get those men out, then we will actually win. But I think that the abortion issue is a more powerful issue than any of the kinds of issues that Trump is pushing towards men. That is my feeling about the abortion issue. And one of the reasons it keeps taking people by surprise. in terms of how powerful it is. It's because there's such a taboo against talking about abortion, but it's an issue that affects a huge number of people.

There were a million abortions in the United States last year. Realistically, it's much more likely to affect people, affect most Americans, than things like the border or violent crime, which Trump is always talking about. And this is why I think the pro-life movement was really caught off guard by the strength of the backlash against Roe versus Wade.

And the fact that in every state where abortion rights have been put on the ballot, no matter how conservative, abortion rights have won, this is one of the things that really gives Kamala Harris's campaign hope that they can get Republicans, that they can get conservatives,

that it's mainly going to be college-educated Republican women, who in what has been a really bizarre election where there have been a lot of very strange promises made, abortion stands out as an issue where you know that lawmakers have direct control over it. Yeah, I'm like so many other things. Yeah, politicians can promise to do something about inflation. They can promise to do something about crime.

They can promise to do something about global warming. Voters know that it's going to be very hard for them to fulfill those promises. On the other hand, when it comes to making abortion law, there's very directly there between what lawmakers say they will do and what they can do. So that's why I think this remains a very important issue in this election. And, yeah, if Harris wins, I imagine it will be the decisive issue. Yeah, and an army of Liz Cheney's potentially coming out and supporting Harris. Now, one of the interesting wrinkles in the past week, David, has been the extent to which allies have prevented the debate and been a bit unhelpful.

We'll talk about Joe Biden's long overdue return to score a massive own goal. But speaking of health care, which is, of course, abortion being a health care issue, Mike Johnson. the Republican Speaker of the House, ultra-conservative, has recently come out and said that if Donald Trump wins and if they hold the House, they will make some major changes to Obamacare, which I suspect Donald Trump isn't going to much enjoy.

Jimmy Kimmel had this fairly remarkable monologue this week where he essentially made an argument to Republican voters. And in one of his key arguments was to say that Donald Trump keeps saying he wants to change Obama care, but for many, many years he's had no plan. He montaged all the times. Trump had a

hilariously vague sense of what he wanted to do, this great plan that never has any details. But Mike Johnson is now saying we're going to dump it. I imagine that doesn't help Donald Trump at all. No, it doesn't help him very much at all. The best thing that Mike Johnson has going for him is that not many people pay much attention to what he says. So maybe these remarks won't have got much traction, although Democrats will be trying to give as much attention to them as possible. Yeah, Obamacare is a popular thing now. Even if not every element of it is popular,

overall, when you ask people about it now in polls, it's getting approval ratings that no politician can boast. You're getting like 60% of the country in favour of it. People are better off under Obamacare. I wish I could go back 10 years in time when Obamacare was so contentious and so controversial and so many people hated it and show them what people think of it now.

Certainly, there are many Republicans who are committed to changing it because they view it as an abomination. But, yeah, actually saying that they're going to do that isn't very helpful at this point. We might remember in the vice presidential debate that J.D. Vance went so far as to present Donald Trump as a defender of Obamacare because he had failed to change it. This was one of the few points in the debate where Tim Walls clearly got the better of J.D. Vantz because even by J.D. Vance's standards, this was unsustainable nonsense. So, yeah, healthcare is one of the issues on which Democrats are the strongest.

It is one of the issues that people care about the most at elections. However, I would say the Democrats haven't done a good job at really making it a salient issue in this election in the same way that they have made abortion into a salient issue. This really is Mike Johnson giving them a bit of a free kick. The Chaser Report, now with extra whispers. Just on Donald Trump, he's out just a short while ago. He's been out in high viz in Green Bay, Wisconsin, saying we're going to protect women whether they like it or not.

Which is, you know, the kind of lack of consent element in there for someone who's been found by a court to have, you know, committed sexual assaults, not the greatest form of the message. That may help the Harris side as well. But clearly he's worried about that. issue too. Now, Kamala Harris went up to the ellipse, and this is another thing. She was trying to present a positive campaign to be the joyful warrior early on. As Election Day has neared, she's gone back on fairly Biden-esque rhetoric about Donald Trump

as a threat to democracy. We have seen John Kelly, Trump's former chief of staff and the general, four-star general, saying that Trump meets the definition of a fascist. A lot of people are leading into this, Donald Trump himself has commented on this and how mean they are for calling him a Nazi and a fascist. What did you make of Harris's speech? One of the things she was trying to do, I guess, was just to remind everyone who she is, because it's certainly fair to say that even as she's been the Democratic nominee for more than 100 days now, a lot of people are going into vote without a sense really of who she is.

Do you think she helped her cause in that final big pitch where she got tens of thousands of people lining the streets of Washington, D.C.? Yeah, this was her biggest rally, and it was probably her biggest TV audience since the debate. I felt that it didn't really add very much. Someone who's been watching her campaign very closely. This just seemed like a recap of the major themes. There are many ways, obviously, in which she's trying to draw a contrast between herself and Trump. And you're right, the campaign really has come full circle from what we saw at the beginning,

which was them saying, they're nothing to be afraid of. They're just weird. We don't want to have anything to do with them. all the way back to, no, this is an actual threat to democracy. And my feeling is, it's because of the stages this campaign had to go through. They're just weird and we don't need to be afraid of them. That was done at a crucial moment where they needed to get deeply demoralized and frightened Democrats back on board. Because fear is not immobilizing emotion.

So that was in order to get Democrats back on board and back in the mood. But now that she is appealing, it seems to me so specifically to Nikki Haley voters, the Trump is a fascist, Trump wants to be a dictator, Trump is going to govern as an authoritarian, that is more about creating fear among conservatives who are really on the fence about Trump. So I think that the, it really reflects the progression of the campaign in a lot of why. Maybe I'm attributing more strategy to it than it actually is. Maybe they've just been, you know, focus grouping the shit out of all of this

and they've decided that this is what works. Maybe it's because Trump's own rhetoric really seems to have been getting more authoritarian, more violent and more racist. What are they? The enemy within the Democrats he wants to throw in jail? And the number of friendly hosts who suggested that he was just joking

and invited him to walk back some of this really fiery rhetoric condemning people who disagree with him as enemies and talking about the army, rounding them up and so on, saying, oh, it's just more of your hyperbole. And most times, we want to understand, David, he's gone, no, no, that's the plan. We're deporting a large number of people. We're rounding up the enemies and so on.

Yeah, no, he is not backing away from any of these comments. And as far as we can see from the polls, he doesn't seem to be paying a political price for them. The polls just get tighter and tighter. A month ago, there was a small and insignificant, but nonetheless, visible lead for Kamala Harris in the national polls and in quite a few of the key swing states. That lead is basically evaporated to this point. So his campaign will be seeing that he doesn't seem to pay a political price for these comments that maybe he's really

tapping into something that people want, that people, you know, they really do see all of this chaos, they feel quite afraid and disturbed and uncomfortable. And they want someone who's just going to come in and sort everything out. Yeah, make the Amtrak run on time, right? Yeah, because he is definitely not backing away from any of this. Yeah, and particularly, I mean, in terms of the closing arguments, when Kamala Harris gave the sort of speech you'd imagine, she'd give at a symbolic place with the White House in the background, reminding Americans what's at stake. The Trump version was to go to Madison Square Garden, which is not a state. He has any chance of winning, of course, in New York, but in his own personal iconography, I'm sure he still thinks of New York as the

center of the world and wanted to have a show of strength there with a real motley crew of supporters, Hulk Hogan, who managed to not pull his shirt off very successfully, but gave it a good go. Tucker Carlson, the bow tie wearing former Fox News commentator, but in particular, a comedian who was a roast comic who John Stewart defended, curiously enough, and to see that he thought it was very funny. American comedy often does involve jokes about stereotyping minorities. Every time I've been to see stand-up in America. That's what has been the kind of meat and potatoes of it, far more so than in Australia. So perhaps that's some context we don't understand here. But Donald Trump would not have wanted the key headline from that rally to be, you know,

Trump's supporter described as Puerto Rico as a floating pile of garbage. And that does seem to have heard in particularly in Pennsylvania. And we can talk about how Joe Biden got involved. But this was certainly, it's even been described as one of these legendary October surprises that suddenly the Latinos that Donald Trump needs might get turned away. Can a joke really make that kind of a difference, David? Yeah, one of the things that I found remarkable about this is this joke in terms of its substance wasn't much worse or much different from what you constantly hear

coming out of Trump's orbit, including Trump. Trump himself, the first time he ever, as I was saying it yesterday, he came down the golden escalator and got stuck, he called Mexicans criminals basically. Look, it's not that different from what we've heard of Trump for nine years. saying Haitians are eating people's pets in Ohio. So what is it about this comment? Well, I think the most important thing about this comment is it wasn't Trump himself who made it.

It has a magical free pass, lifetime free pass. Wasn't someone who was really close to Trump either. It was just, it was really some nobody. So if Trump had made it, all of his allies would have rushed to his defense and everybody else just would have been used to him getting away with it. When people who are not Trump tried to say, the kinds of stuff that Trump says, everybody can see how appalling it is. Yeah.

And the less famous and the less influential someone says, the worse it gets. And you could hear from the audio, it goes down badly even in the room. And I think probably even in the room, people were immediately considering the political implications. There's a lot going on. Like, I don't know if you guys know this, but there's literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. Yeah.

I think it's called Puerto Rico. Okay. All right. Okay. We're getting there. Again, normally I don't follow the national anthem, everybody. This isn't exactly a perfect comedy set up. Yeah, this guy Tony Hinchcliffe, who, I mean, if you go to the Daily Show YouTube, you can see some of his other jokes and the kind of stuff that he does. He is a roast comic. He's an insult comic, right? That's what he does. But certainly without that context and that particular It's just, you'd certainly never say that in any comic forum here in Australia, I don't think. And yeah, it went very badly with a group that, you know, Donald Trump really doesn't need.

Yeah. And the fact that it was so specifically targeted against Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans, there are nearly half a million Puerto Ricans in Pennsylvania. You could see them immediately realize that no good could possibly come of this. So I think this is the first time in the entire campaign that I've seen the Trump camp try to distance themselves from something offensive. And they did it very quickly. J.D. Vance tried to avoid the issue for the first 24 hours saying he hadn't heard it. But then he started saying, oh, this was a stupid racist joke. Notably, Trump himself didn't really try very hard to distance himself from it.

He said that the, you know, the comedians weren't bedded beforehand. The jokes weren't vetted. But he said, oh, is this a big deal? I don't really think this is a big deal. So, you know, Trump's own instinct is not to back away from it. But certainly people around him realized the damage that this would do. Peter Navarro referred to Hinchcliff as the dumbest asshole ever to come down the comedy pike, which is, you know, pretty strong statement.

So everyone in Trump world was not happy with it. You had Rick Scott, the governor of Florida and members of Congress from Florida saying we love Puerto Ricans. This doesn't reflect our values at all. You have Trump, of course, saying that he's done more for Puerto Ricans than any president in history, which will be real news to people who live through Hurricane Maria and can remember him throwing rolls of paper towels. No other president went down there and threw paper towels at the crowd. It would be fair to Donald Trump. Yeah. And yeah, the reaction from Puerto Ricans was bad.

You had just about every major Puerto Rican celebrity, Bad Bunny, Jennifer Lopez, Ricky Martin. Like when Ricky Martin is getting involved in politics, you know things are getting serious. These are all people who will potentially have some sway over undecided voters in the Puerto Rican community. Puerto Rico's largest newspaper editorialized against Trump and in favor of Harris. Even though Trump does have some Puerto Rican surrogates who are currently working very, very hard for him. He must have been aware of the damage that this would do.

I don't know if it was even the worst thing actually said at that event. Yeah, Tucker Carlson referring to Kamala Harris as the first Samoan Malaysian candidate. It's going to be pretty hard to look at us and say, you know what? Kamala Harris, she's just, she got 85 million votes

because she's just so impressive. As the first Samoan Malaysian low IQ. You former California prosecutor ever to be elected president. It was just a groundswell of popular support. You had another speaker. I don't even know who it was suggesting that Kamala Harris is a prostitute, which is becoming an increasingly kind of prevalent theme in this push, you know,

to get young, angry male voters out. I'm not here to invalidate her. She's a fake, a fraud. She's a pretender. Her and her pimp. handlers will destroy our country. You had Rudy Giuliani there at all. And then there was Hulk Hogan.

Now, okay, Hulk Hogan didn't say anything. Yeah, yeah. He didn't say anything particularly bad, but I just want to make a couple of comments about the re-emergence of Hull Cogan. It's important to remember in the 80s, Hulk Hogan was essentially a children's character. This was at the time that wrestling was becoming very oriented

towards marketing itself towards children. Yeah, he was on lunchboxes. I remember. Yeah, toys made. and his closing line was always directly addressed to children. What was it? Say your prayers, eat your vitamins, because he was marketing a line of vitamins to children.

I can't remember what the rest of it was, and he would refer to his child fans as My Little Hulksters. And during the Gulf War, he got very upset because he said, Saddam Hussein wants to come after my little hulksters with scud missiles, You know, infallibly patriotic. But I've been thinking about this because it's not just young men that Trump is going after. He's going after Gen X-Men as well.

And bringing out this childhood hero of a lot of Gen X-Men, who's now referring to little Trumpsters rather than little Pulpses. It really is, I think, quite a, you know, it's a specifically targeted act. Hulk Hogan seemed more aware than anybody of the fact. that people were likely to make parallels between this rally and the notorious 1939 Madison Square Garden rally, which was pro-Nazi, because he said, I don't see any stinking Nazis here. So I just want to give Hulk Hogan the award for most historically literate speaker at the

Trump-Madison Square Guard. I mean, that's very impressive. That is quite funny that at a point where, you know, Donald Trump's being hailed as a Nazi, they went back to the same venue. I'm confident he was the only person involved who was aware of that resonance. So, yes, if the sanest person on the stage is Hulk Hogan, you know things are quite interesting. But, okay, so that was yet another strange event. And honestly, Rudy Giuliani is increasingly seeming like some manner of a zombie.

I don't know what's going on there. Let's talk finally, David, about Election Day itself, what we can expect, what is going to happen. We might just take a moment to break here while we do that. The Chaser Report. More news. Less often. So it's Wednesday our time when the results should start coming in. On election day itself, it's, yeah, this whole ground game, I guess we'll see

whether or not the Democrats really do get people out there. They've raised apparently now a billion and a half US dollars to try and get people out there. So they may well simply obliterate, you know, the Trump campaign. If Elon Musk is in charge of something, you can guarantee it's going to be a little bit chaotic. But, I mean, who knows? Talk us through how the day is going to unfold. When do you think we'll start to get numbers that actually mean something in states, being called. Yeah. So the earliest states that get called are states that usually don't have much

of an impact on the final result, Kentucky, Tennessee, Vermont. The first big one that tends to get called is Florida. Florida has the fastest and cleanest vote counting procedure in the country because of the trauma of the 2000 election where, you know, the Florida vote lasted weeks and weeks and weeks. They don't want to repeat of that. So even though Florida is often very close, they often have some of the earliest results out. However, my suspicion is that that also is not going to have much of an impact. I think that Trump is going to win that as expected. Although it could, you know, by the middle of the day,

be giving a bit of an indication about how the race is going, depending on how big the margin is in Florida. So Paris is doing well in Florida, even if it's tight at all, that might be about weather for others. Yeah, I think so. won that by three and a half percent last time around. If it looks like it's going to be closer than that, that could be a sign that Harris is doing well. Probably the first swing state whose results we are likely to get is North Carolina, which also has quite quick vote counting

procedures because they count early votes beforehand. That really could be important. It is the possible pivotal state in the election. However, that is also a state that either candidate it could win without winning the election, although once again, if Harris is winning it, that would be a pretty hopeful sign for her, although she could still definitely lose the election even while winning North Carolina. If it comes down to Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, then it could take quite a long time to know the results because both of them have laws saying that early votes can't be counted until all of the votes are in. And we've seen how many early votes are being cast this year. It's huge.

numbers. So that really could take quite a long time. It could stretch out for days. It could, though, be over more quickly than we think. I think especially if Trump wins. In 2016, we did know by about two or three. It was fairly clear by about two or three in the afternoon that Trump was going to win. I think, I mean, Trump didn't give his speech until I think about six o'clock our time that night but it was just pretty clear who was going to win you know when the writing is really on the wall

it's on the wall it could be over fairly quickly but it could drag on for a very long time in 2020 until about five in the afternoon it appeared that Trump was building these really big leads that was around five of the afternoon though our time that was when

Fox News courts quite surprisingly called Arizona, which made us realize there was perhaps more to the race than we thought within a couple of hours. The New York Times was saying that Georgia was too close to call. But you'll remember that it was not until three days later that we actually, or four days later, that we actually knew the results. Yeah, I think Saturday was really clear. Pennsylvania takes a long time to count.

Wisconsin takes a long time to count. Nevada takes a very long time to... Yeah. And there may be challenges and recounts and battle. Yeah, absolutely. And in last time around, the smallest margin was 10,000 in Georgia. When it's a 10,000 vote margin, it's very unlikely that any kind of legal challenge is going to succeed. Like it would need to be something very, very big to actually change the result when it's that many ballots at stake.

But if we go back to 2000, when the margin in Florida was. less than 700. When it's that close, then legal challenges have a much better chance of succeeding and actually changing the course of the election. And given how close the polling has been, we may well be in one of those years where in some key state, it comes down to a margin that is so narrow that it could be legally challenged by either side. And that's the scenario where it would start dragging on for weeks potentially. Well, there's also the notion, and Matt Evans been talking about this on his podcast. Team MAGA has for the past four years been strategically putting allies in local canvassing boards and so on that people who are charged with certifying

the election. Would that come into play really if things are close? The example given last time was in Michigan, in particularly in Detroit itself in Wayne County, where the Republican certifies refused to certify the election and there was a protracted campaign really over until the door got worked out. Yeah, I think that, I mean, that did threaten to really delay the results. I'm not sure if that ever could have changed the results, but part of the whole purpose is delay, delay, delay for as long as possible, in the hope that if Harris wins, that they can still deny her the chance to actually get to the 270 electoral college. Yeah, cause doubt, obfuscate. And is there a point where, or is this a, a,

a discredited legal theory. I mean, if places simply don't certify their results, does it go to the House of Representatives to decide in the end, in which case that's good for Trump, right? If one candidate can't get to 270, then yes. If neither candidate can get to 270, that's when it goes to the House. A lot of legal and political analysts regard this

as an extremely unlikely scenario, but it would probably be the best chance. The theory that the results could be sent back to the start, eight houses to devise. That one's been legally discredited. Yeah, they cut that off, didn't they? It's been thrown out by the Supreme Court. The idea that the, well, I mean, given that

the vice president is Kamala Harris, it would be extremely unlikely for her to protest her own electoral victory, but the changes to the Electoral Amendment Act clarified that the vice president can't disrupt the process. The vice president only plays a ceremonial role in counting

the votes. It also raised the threshold for congressional protests against votes. So that circuit is probably cut off as well. The whole thing would be just trying to delay certification at the state level for so long that some state or some states actually don't have a result by January 6th or whenever the deadline is. And then it has to go to a vote of the House of Representatives, which Republicans would win because it's done on the basis of state delegations rather than just member numbers. Okay. So lots of potential things there. We don't know what's going to happen? After all the conversations, after all the months of uncertainty,

yeah, this is really the tightest, isn't it, in a very long time? Far tighter than Bush versus Gore looked before polling day. Yes. And we also just weren't paying as much attention to Bush versus Gore. Let's be honest about this. Chad might have been, but the rest of us weren't. The rest of us weren't. Well, look, I mean, certainly talking to Chaz about this stuff, before Planet America even started, he certainly had a beginning on with. So presumably your post-election podcast with Chaz,

will be more like six hours rather than the standard three for the PEP podcast. Is that right? Well, now that the time limit's been removed, it's entirely possible. How has it been removed? Yeah. Chas overcame the technical limitation, which I think is thanks to none other than Locky. Producer Lachlan. Producer Lachlan of this very podcast.

Oh my goodness. What has he done? That's a shocking thing. Although we may never get to speak to you again. You might just be podcasting in digital. Definitely. But thank you for all of your thoughts during the campaign. We'll see you on the other side. My absolute pleasure. Which could be in a few months. All right. That's Professor David Smith of the US Study Center at the University of Sydney.

Check out the PEP with Chas and Dr Dave podcast if you want. The very long version of this once again. And we'll catch you on Monday here on The Chase Report.