The Dispatch Podcast - Finding the Ideological Center of Gravity

Episode Date: July 23, 2021

Patrick Ruffini, a co-founder of the predictive analytics and research firm Echelon Insights, joins Sarah and Chris to discuss his recent analysis of the American electorate. Ruffini tells our hosts where the ideological center of gravity seems to be and why cultural issues might be driving voter turnout. Chris asks whether a party can adopt a perfect policy position and if party bases tolerate ideological flexibility. Plus, why are moderate Democrats outperforming progressives? And why are educated voters drifting left, but non-educated voters are drifting right? Show Notes: -Echelon Insights Four Quadrants of American Voters Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Isger, joined this week by Chris Steyerwalt, and we are talking to Patrick Rafini, the co-founder of Eschelon Insights, the polling firm. You may know of Kristen Soltis Anderson, but if you don't follow Patrick Rafini on Twitter and get his newsletter, which you can sign up for on his Twitter account, by the way, then you are missing, I would say, more than half of the genius output of Eshline. on insights. I was telling Patrick right before we started, this is the one newsletter that I read start to finish every single volume episode. What are what are newsletters called? Anyway, we will talk to Patrick today about their latest poll, which was really fascinating.

Let's dive right in. Patrick, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you, Sarah. I'm really excited about this to introduce sort of a broader concept into how we think of the American electorate, especially walking into the midterms, and 2024, which is just going to prove to be a show made of feces. So I was hoping that you could walk us through this poll that you put together, the four quadrues,

quadrants of American voters? So what we set out to do here was to find the ideological center of gravity in American politics. And what we found specifically, when you ask a series of questions that are focused on the one hand, on cultural issues, everything from abortion to guns to as America, the greatest country in the world, and economic questions, everything from, is there too much inequality, is the government too big or too small? When you ask all of those questions, what we find is the center of gravity is to the right on cultural questions and slightly to the left on economic questions. Specifically, when we add up all the questions,

we find the American electorate is 56% culturally conservative, 44% culturally liberal, and 52% economically liberal and 48% economically conservative. Now, I think from a broader sense, I think this can explain a lot about why there's been such an emphasis on cultural issues in the early part of the Biden presidency on things like cancel culture, on things like critical race theory, because people on the right, and these are revealed preferences of Republican politicians, right, in action, believe that the public favors them more on those issues than they favor them on the economic issues. That is quite in contrast to the original Tea Party that we saw in the initial opposition to the Obama presidency,

which was almost entirely focused on spending and economic type questions. So where we get these quadrants is when you actually combine this economic and cultural dimension. So you just put kind of on the x-axis, you've got your economic questions, and on the right-act, I'm sorry, in the y-axis, you've got your cultural questions. And what we do, and what we find here is that eight-in-10 voters are roughly consistent in their views between economic and cultural issues. So 42% of voters line up as consistently conservative on both cultural and economic questions, and 39% of voters line up as consistently liberal on both. But two in ten hold consistent, conflicting views, conservative on one, liberal on the other. But most of those people are populist.

And what we call populist means economically liberal, but culturally conservative. And six percent are what we call libertarians, which would be culturally liberal and economically conservative, which is really kind of the favorite, I think, I mean, the way to be, if you're going to be different somehow, I think that's sort of the favorite way to be different among D.C. elites, but it is largely outnumbered by these populists who are really kind of a classic swing voter. They voted for Clinton in 2016, but voted for Trump in 2020. They swing between the two parties. Currently, they lean a little bit to the right. So if you were starting a political party, like there were no political parties in the country, you get to walk in with this polling information. and create a political party that you want to, like, dominate elections, what you sort of think at the beginning when you start talking about this poll is, oh, great, well, that's easy.

You would have an economically liberal party with a socially conservative party, and then you would just win everything. But when you're sort of breaking that down that actually, no, 42% are socially conservative, economically conservative, 40% are socially liberal, economically liberal, it doesn't quite work that way. So I'm curious, create a political party that dominates in this country out of this data. So I think that Donald Trump kind of recognized this, kind of recognized that the demand within, there was sort of unmet demand within that segment of the electorate that was economically more liberal or more centrist or pragmatic, however you want to

put it, and socially and culturally a bit to the right, which had been an underserved. served quadrant in American politics prior to Donald Trump. He sensed that that was there and went after it. So I think to some extent, the Trump phenomenon was the ideal party for him. Now, we also ask this question, and we'd like to ask this question as a third time we've done it, of imagine if we didn't have these two parties. Imagine if we had a multi-party democracy. We had five different political parties, political parties that are similar to maybe the kinds of parties we might see in Western Europe. So we've now asked this question three times running. We asked it in conjunction with these quadrant questions. And what we do is we simply read to folks,

we don't talk about what the party would be called. We don't talk about who would lead the party. We would just talk about here are the platforms of those parties. And what we find is, What comes out on top in that dimension, in that question, is a, the center-left party, we call the Labor Party. We think it would probably be led by someone like Joe Biden that would look kind of like today's Democratic Party, but entirely focused on economic questions, entirely focused on sort of getting a better deal for the middle and working class and leaving aside the cultural questions. The second most subscribed to party in this hypothetical multi-party democracy

would be a Donald Trump-style nationalist party that is focused on ending illegal immigration and ending political correctness. Coming in third is a traditional conservative party, which we have led in our slides by Mike Pence, which is the traditional Reagan three legs of the stool, which is free markets, traditional family values, strong national defense, what you would have thought about as conservatism before Donald Trump. Right now, you know, that party is trailing the Trumpist nationalist party in terms of loyalty among voters on the right. So it's been that traditional conservative vision has been eclipsed by this Trumpist nationalist vision.

You also include the Assella Party, which you have Mike Bloomberg as the head of, and the Green Party with AOC. Chris, you know, a lot of the time we'll talk about like, oh, if only we had a parliamentary system or something. This is like a Jonah fetish thing, maybe. And then when I see a slide like this, I'm like, oh, no, nope, I don't like this better. Well, I will speak on behalf of Brother Goldberg, who is not present, that I know he doesn't want a parliamentary system. I don't want a parliamentary system, but we are kind of making one out of a republic because the only way that you can get stuff done is that you have to take control of Congress and the presidency at the same time and you ram through unpopular things to satisfy your base

and then you get voted back out and you get to do it all over again. You know, I am sorry that I did not know the topic today and I have not had a chance to look at the poll, but I believe what you say because it is true and has been true. for most of American political life. This is you, the party you described, the party that Donald Trump was trying to make was culturally conservative and fiscally liberal. The New Deal coalition that ruled the country

for most of the 20th century was fiscally liberal and socially conservative. So this is, obviously, if you can get to the spot, if you can run out to the sweet spot, where you have a lot of free money, and also disadvantage others or push back against social change, then you've got it.

And that's the working man's party. It's the working class party. It's that stuff. And only a handful of times, our friend Carl Rove talks about the McKinley majority, where, excuse me, at the beginning of the 20th century, where Republicans put together this same kind of coalition. So it seems like the challenge is you can have it and the Democrats had it for a long time and the Republicans had it for a long time, but it's very slippy now. You can get it for a minute.

Obama can get it for a minute. Biden's got it for a minute. Trump had it for a minute, but it's very slippy. Is there anything in your data that talks about the ephemeral nature of this coalition now versus the historical. It's historical cousins. Wait, you don't get to slip to ephemeral. Slippies way better. Is there anything in your data about the slippy nature, Patrick?

Well, I think you're right in that it's always the working man's party. It's never sort of, well, this is sort of the more thoughtful thinking man's party. And, you know, we need to moderate. And it's usually like, you know, when parties do make it back from the wilderness, it's usually not because, you know, they listen to elite opinion, right, but better, you know, that it's usually because they took, you know, really advance a much more distinctive, sharper message. That was also more aligned with the vast majority of Americans who consider themselves working in middle class, who do not have a college degree, who do not, you know, maybe didn't go to college at all.

So I think that the way that folks in Washington along the East Coast think about the American electorate is just fundamentally out of step with sort of the real demographic nature of what the American electorate is, particularly among minority voters, right? We saw a lot of minority voters swing to Donald Trump in the last election because they started acting more like white voters who were working class voters. So they voted more along class and educational lines than they've been voting historically along racial lines. And that's what Donald Trump, I think, tapped into in the last election. But I think you can kind of also see this really clearly in the fact that, you know, the Republican Party right now

is this drug of war between Trump nationalists and traditional concerns. And, you know, it's unclear which side will win at the moment. It's sort of 50-50. And we've been asking this question within the Republican electorate for the last two years of, do you consider yourself more a supporter of Donald Trump or more a supporter of the Republican Party? And it's 50-50. I mean, there's some swing, you know, it swings against Trump after January 6th that was really skewed in favor of him during the election. But the real, where you really see this is within the Democratic Party. the fact that this center-left party purely focused on economics, purely focused on

inequality, purely focused on delivering tangible economic benefits to working in middle-class people, just dominates any kind of conceivable alternative, whether it's on the far, like a far-left party that would be led by AOC, or this sort of more moderate pro-business but pro-women and gay rights you know, a cella party, which if there were to be a party of woke capital, it would be the Acela party. It sort of represents that D.C., New York consensus, but it's not a very popular party. And you see this also in the results in Democratic primaries were progressive, just keep getting beat by candidates in New York City like Eric Adams, a former cop who said, you know, we shouldn't defund the police. And it was more about standing up for the interest.

of the vast majority of New York Democratic voters who are working class minorities who don't really care a lot about the fights on Twitter on a daily basis. The big problem, so you're so right about the quadrants and the empty quadrant where a lot of college-educated and elite thought leaders live, right? They live in Mike Bloomberg's quadrant,

and only Guam, only the Guamian, Republicans are there with him, and there are, relatively speaking, very few. Does your work get into, though, the question of intensity? And does it get into the question of engagement? Because I feel like, and I don't want to be like a McKinsey consultant here, but I feel like there's four quadrants, and then there's, it's really a four by four box, Because the other question is, we have tons of Americans, and I've been doing a lot of research on this, and it's a little bit of a fetish for me, about what do the least engaged versus most engaged people want? I think part of the reason our politics is so stupid are that the people who are the most engaged are the most extreme, right? So the people who are the loudest, angriest, most engaged are also going to tend to be the most ideologically different and pulled apart versus the people who are lower propensity voters and who are less engaged are going to tend to be, as you point out, confused, confused, not confused, confusing in their ideation and ideology.

They're going to be pro-life, anti-gun, they're going to be, they're going to have a hodgepodge of things because they don't think about it all the time. because politics isn't the most important thing in their lives. So we have highly divided, highly engaged, and not far less divided, but not engaged and tuned out of the system. Can your data say anything to that kind of stuff? Well, I think it's absolutely true, right? I mean, it's true that the people who tend to be in the middle, who are swing voters,

who are really truly up for grabs from election to election, tend not to be the ones that you can grab with a coherent sort of ideological message. And we see this in our data. You see this with sort of non-college educated voters who tend to have more inconsistent views between the social and economic dimension versus college-educated voters who tend to, whichever way they come down on these cultural issues, is how they're generally going to come down on these economic issues. But to bring another layer to this question of engagement, I think there's also a different

in engagement between engagement on these economic questions and engagement on the cultural issues, which tend to dominate everything. And how we see this in the data is if you break down the sort of these cross-pressured quadrants, you've got the populists who are economically liberal, socially conservative, and the libertarians, they tend to vote whichever way they lean culturally. So those populists tended to vote for Donald Trump in the last election. The libertarians, even though the libertarian party, I guess, would-ish be associated with the right, I mean, in theory, but like that doesn't seem to, it's not really like a one-to-one

a comparison there. But those types of voters tend to vote if you're culturally liberal, you tend to vote Democrat. If you're culturally conservative, you tend to vote Republican, regardless of where you stand on those economic questions. Not long ago, I saw someone go through a sudden loss, and it was a stark reminder of how quickly life can change and why protecting the people you love is so important. Knowing you can take steps to help protect your loved ones and give them that extra layer of security brings real peace of mind. The truth is the consequences of not having life insurance can be serious. That kind of financial strain on top of everything else is why life insurance indeed matters. Ethos is an online platform that makes getting life insurance

fast and easy to protect your family's future in minutes, not months. Ethos keeps it simple. It's 100% online, no medical exam, just a few health questions. You can get a quote in as little as 10 minutes, same day coverage, and policies starting at about two bucks a day, build monthly, with options up to $3 million in coverage, with a 4.8 out of five-star rating on trust pilot and thousands of families already applying through Ethos. It builds trust. Protect your family with life insurance from Ethos. Get your free quote at ethos.com slash dispatch. That's ethos.com slash dispatch. Application times may vary. Rates may vary. So for me, going through this slide deck, really, it could have been labeled

why Mitt Romney lost in 2012 and Paul Ryan was never the future of the Republican Party. A long title, I acknowledge, maybe not as catchy as the one you came up with. But you look at the last few elections and then you look at some of these slides and what really jumps out to me

is you have the Nationalist Party, which you have Donald Trump's head by, which is helpful. The Nationalist Party is stealing from the Labor Party, which is the largest other party. And when you look back at 2012 and the Paul Ryan Mitt Romney Republican Party direction that they were trying to go, they were trying to join the conservative, that's the Mike Pence head, with the Acella, the Mike Bloomberg head. And the Acella folks

are the smallest, right? Like, that's like the libertarians who, what, have, like, 6% in your quadrant or something. There's no libertarians. They all live in D.C., maybe some in New York. And so they're outspoken. They're more likely to be on TV. It's sort of like how Democrats have fallen into this Twitter trap. Republicans fell into the pundit trap. There were a lot of libertarian pundits compared to this tiny little percentage that's here. I'm curious how you think your polling would have looked in 2012. Well, I think that to some extent people do gravitate towards the message of the standard bearer of the party. So I think that, you know, it's interesting. because we ran these numbers in the end of the 2020 campaign just to see how it would look,

you know, heading into the presidential election. And what we find was actually the Conservative Party was actually dominating the Nationalist Party at that point in time. And it's since flip. And I think my explanation for that is Trump didn't really talk about those, a lot of those questions that, you know, we're really animating his 2016 campaign during the 2020 campaign. There was a lack, a relative lack of emphasis on immigration, a relative lack of emphasis on these cultural issues. It was more about COVID and the economy. So I think people will tend

to, at a particular moment in time, gravitate towards a description that is consistent with what they're hearing on the news from party leaders. But the enduring truth here is that demographically, the United States is 70% does not have a college degree, 70% of adults and about 6 and 10 voters do not have a college degree. So a message that is more tuned to, you know, that audience, a message that is more tuned to, you know, standing up, again, for those lower and middle class, working in middle class interests, as opposed to a message that says, You didn't build that and, you know, look at all these business owners who are being wronged by Obama's rhetoric, right? Which was something we definitely saw in 2012.

That's just inherently, there's just a bigger market for that message if conservatives can adapt themselves, which I think Donald Trump actually did and why he saw some success and why he exceeded expectations. Well, there's a big market for incumbent presidents too. and they usually win. I have to think, as I watch the Republican Party, try to do what you're saying would be wise for them, right? Republicans are trying to be more economically populist. We're going to break up big tech. We're going to do this, they say.

We're going to do that, they say. And they're trying to be two front rabble rousers. and we're going to embrace economic populism along with the cultural populism. And I note something, which is a lot of Republicans, as you say, will describe themselves as whatever they think they're supposed to describe themselves at the moment that a strong sense of negative partisanship will create an autonomic response. Are you more like this? You're more like that.

And they'll say, I think we're supposed to be more like this right now. And I'm sure that if you would have run this in 2012, a lot more Republicans would have said, by golly it's this is a bane capital rocks and i think this i will you know do this um for those persuadable less engaged persuadable voters we're talking about my hunch is that it often comes down to the person that they liked Barack Obama the question i always look to not in every case but in most cases is uh cares about people like me uh that survey question that Hillary Clinton managed to lose the question to a billionaire reality TV show host on the question of cares about people like me and that for those less engaged voters who are willing to the old styroaltism is

Americans will vote for very liberal people. They will vote for very conservative people, but they're always voting for a person. And how George Bush beat John Kerry or how Barack Obama won two terms, all that stuff, a lot of it had to come down to just likeability is the shorthand term for it, but I think it's confidence in caring, that they're confident that this person has their interest at heart. Is there a danger for Republicans that they look at convincing data like yours and say, yeah, this is where the votes are. Look at the quadrant. And then as Josh Hawley or Ted Cruz or whomever sprint after those votes, they skeve everybody out along the way because they're pushing it too hard and they're putting ideology in the front

seat. Is that a danger? I think it's absolutely a danger and I think it's a misreading of potentially there's a misreading going on. This data could be misread into saying let's if we just simply adopt the perfect ideological policy position and I realize that I started off here by saying this is the ideological center of gravity and this is sort of a, you know, a guidepost about where you might need to be. But if that's all you're doing and you don't have a personality, literally. Right. I mean, and so like, and I think like we get, I think we are getting a little bit too caught off on these esoteric policy questions because I don't think people are actually that engaged on this question of big, like should we break up big tech? I don't think that's an

animating thing for most voters. It may be for most voters on the right who are, are concerned right now that, you know, oh, you know, my posts are getting canceled on Facebook, right? But it's not really a concern for the average voter. What it's about for the average voter on these economic issues, and, you know, this is still a pretty divided country. It's not a country that is by any means dominated by the left on economics, right? But what it's really about is, are you standing up for people like me? And I know that's a cheesy form. No, that's, you know, is this person on my side? And it becomes almost a cultural question. I think in the same way that Barack Obama leveraging the Bain Capital stuff, the car elevator

stuff against Mitt Romney was sort of not just a question of economics. It was a question of, is this person like me? Is this person really understand what I'm going through on a daily basis, you know, and I think Democrats at their best when they've been most effective have been able to leverage that sort of sense of working for the common man into an almost culture war divide. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you've seen successful politicians, the most successful politicians, you mentioned Obama, but Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, Jack Kennedy, a host of people who are able to take their strength, take the part, the quadrant where they've got the core strength,

and then use that as a springboard to go grab some of the other voters. So we talk about Bill Clinton and the Sister Soldier moment. He was running on economic issues, saw the window open up to grab some cultural support to let those blue-collar voters know that he was cool. He wasn't a weirdo draft dodger. He was okay. So very often it is that you've got to strengthen one side

and then how do you use that as a springboard into the other side? does your research tell us about the willingness of party bases to tolerate ideological flexibility? Is there anything that we could sift out from here? Because really what, as Joe Biden demonstrated, what you need to win a national election is everybody to stick together and then you go steal some of the other guys stuff. That's how you do it. And Obama did it and Biden, that's how you do it. what can you tell us about the willingness of ideological flexibility among core partisan groups? I don't know if it's directly in this data, but I think we just can

observe it based on the behavior, how voters have actually behaved of the last couple of elections, where you had, you know, on this cultural dimension, I mean, I almost like to think about these as sub-quadrants within the quadrants. But, you know, these cultural, if we were asking this sort of cultural dimension about this cultural dimension in two, 2005 or 2000, it will be dominated by questions like abortion and gay marriage, right? I mean, that would be the, those would be the dominant questions, you know, something like cancel culture or something would seem very strange or obviously a lot of the debates have shifted since then. And what you saw is a cultural, you know, what you do kind of see in

this data is the culture war is so much less driven today. by the religious right than it was. And now we have this more, this more secular debate that really Donald Trump inhabits where, you know, it's really a question of, you know, do we just this sort of, and purely secular vision of America, the sort of traditional America that we grew up with versus, you know, really experimenting with a different kind of America

and removing a lot of these social, moral, religious questions, which aren't really huge dividing lines among Republicans. We looked at this among white voters, for example. Those aren't huge dividing lines, but these questions of racism, immigration, guns, right? Those are now the most divisive cultural questions, and that's what you tend to see leading the debate more often. but I think I think regarding that my original point was like you know Donald Trump came in

and was not a member of the religious right didn't go to church had a record of being pro-choice didn't really say anything about these issues other than saying I'm going to appoint whatever Supreme Court justice is you want and people were fine with that yep they were they were happily transactional in that space because they were more afraid of the other side they were And I guess that's, we're back to where we started. Negative partisanship is a hell of a drug. All right. So looking at 2022, Democrats have very little room for error here.

Very, very little. What, based on your data, what are they doing wrong right now that they will need to fix in the next 18 months? Well, I think that Joe Biden very, is, you know, I'm not saying he's read our data, But I think he's a good instinctive politician. He's been around for a while. And he understands that this is where the Democratic base and what the is and what the Democratic base wants to see. And it's not the Democratic Party on Twitter.

So I think you're seeing the message out of the White House is pretty clearly and purely focused on the infrastructure deal, these economic questions. The challenge that he has is he's swimming against a very. formidable tide, I think, which is that don't tend to vote on those questions. You know, they tend to gravitate, you know, once a lot of these questions, you know, once something like defunding the police was injected into the national debate last year, once the protests rose in salience, you know, that really did give Donald Trump an opening. And Republicans have been seizing those openings, I think, pretty consistently in a way that I think,

makes it hard because ultimately I think that, you know, I think while Joe Biden, I think is, I think, trying to pursue the electorally optimal strategy here. He has an entire Democratic Party under his wing who doesn't necessarily respond to the same incentives, who is trying to, first and foremost, if you're a candidate, you have to raise money. So you're trying to attract left-wing donors with a left-wing message. And that's really what they, what tripped them up to some extent in 2020. It's not that the average Democrat running was saying defund the police. But the voices that were saying defund the police were so loud and so noisy that they had to answer for that.

And I think you're seeing a version of that play out right now with things like critical race theory, with cancel culture, with all of that, where they, and the border, quite frankly, where they are, potentially can get tripped up on these cultural dimensions, which again, we think lean a little bit that naturally favor conservatives. I don't know anyone who has a more both in-depth and generalized media diet than you do, especially for data science of all types. I'm curious looking back at 2020. I mean, you were doing polling in the run up to 2020, but now we have some really good post-2020 data. What has surprised you the most that you have learned? I mean, I think that the big story coming out of 2020 for me, and, you know, it's something that is this changing nature of the conservative coalition potentially, and too, including

more non-whites in the conservative coalition, which I think, you know, a lot of people kind of thought, like, might be the case with Donald Trump, you know, he might be able to attract a little bit more support, but he was also going to lose big in the election. And so it wouldn't really matter that much. And it turns out it did matter quite a bit, not enough for Donald Trump to win, but it did matter from the sense of, you know, he got a lot of extra votes out of Florida. He got a lot of extra votes out of Texas in the end, didn't make it very close in those states to the extent that he was able to win Texas pretty comfortably and win Florida by a pretty decisive. margin as well. So I think the changing nature and the realignment of politics right now,

which we're seeing sort of a declining salience of race as a factor in how people vote and the increasing importance of education across racial lines in terms of how people are voting is going to be the most significant change. I think we saw come out of 2020. We could potentially see heading into 2024 as educated, more educated voters who do represent still a minority of the

American electorate but still growing in their numbers drift left, but this non-college educated majority drifts right. Word. What's your next big poll? What are you wanting to look at next? I mean, I

am continue to be fascinated by, ways in which in thinking about new ways which we can segment these parties, because I think, you know, it gets a little in recent years, you know, just looking at things through this part. It gets, it can get very boring, right? And just look at things and you basically look at poll and it comes back. Well, 90% of Republicans support this, 90% of Democrats support that. And that's really the key driver. But I think that that masks a lot of the, even though there, you know, you're,

used to be a lot more texture and nuance beneath the surface. You know, you used to have West Virginia Democrats and you used to have Northeast Republicans, right? So you used to have all of that. Now you don't have that as much anymore. But I think capturing just more ways to how we can sort of pick apart these divides within the parties, which I think are very salient and are going to be very important in terms of who wins the primaries. And because who wins the primaries is, you know, is going to define what the party and the message is for the general electorate. So I think this was part of that. I just continue to like look for ways to, you know, what are ways we can further highlight what these differences are within the parties.

All right. I think it's time for the fun round. Which are you looking for? forward to more. The Olympics or Ted Lassau season two? Ted Lassau season two. Wrong answer. I mean, it's a really close call. First of all, you needed to struggle with the answer, but then in the end, you needed to, you know, say USA, USA. Well, I do say USA, except I'm a huge European soccer fan, even though I haven't, I'll confess even though I was certain, it's like, well, I still need to binge Ted Lassow season of one. I'm like, I'm definitely looking forward to once I get done with season one, getting into season two, not quite as interested in the Olympics.

That doesn't seem that, I mean, at this year seems a little bit of a downer, lack of spectators, all of this, all of that going on over there. So wait, are you saying you haven't seen Ted Lasso season one, or you're just going to watch it? I haven't, but I'm the most enthusiastic Ted Lasso. Oh, my God. I'm so jealous of you. Wow. Seeing that because it's right in my wheelhouse.

I mean, it's right. I mean, sort of as an English Premier League. I wonder if it can live up to the hype, though. I don't know. I'm like, I'll be, I'm sure I'll be picking it apart. Yeah. Whoa. All right, Chris, what about you?

I mean, most of the Olympics are terrible. Oh! And... Get off my podcast. Many fake events. No. And much of it is preposterous. I turned on the television yesterday to try to like, well, and we're finishing up dinner.

And I thought, well, you know, let's see maybe the, whatever. And it was like, Canada plays, you know, whatever socialist hellhole in women's softball. It's the Olympics. And I'm like, nah, I don't think so. I know how to save the Olympics if anybody wants to listen. move it to a permanent site in Greece, take it back to its homeland, put it there, quit taking it around the world where it is a target for all of these problems. Yeah, I like that.

Dramatically limit the number of events. Get back to the, and also, by the way, fewer games, more stuff that is measurable, quantifiable. I threw it this far. I ran that fast. I did whatever. When you get down to the stuff where they're dancing with ribbons in their underwear rolling around on the carpet and they're like oh that was a nine seven no no no no that was a nine

four sir how dare you call it a nine seven it's it's it's silly and it's like totally ridiculous so uh i am i hope the united states crushes every other nation in the world that we dominate the gold medal count even if it's stupid i hope we're the as is the case with america we're the best at many stupid things so there's no reason that we shouldn't also be the best at this and i hope we dominate rolling around on the floor with ribbons in our underwear. So I just don't understand. Like, I watched the opening ceremonies this morning with my 13-month-old. He was riveted, obviously.

But the best part is I did not do well in sophomore geography. Was that freshman year? It was freshman year geography of high school. And so the opening Olympics is where, like, they showed a little map in the corner. I did not know where Azerbaijan was definitely. not for the last 20 years until today. So, like, you learned so much. And while, Chris, in theory,

I agree with everything you just said in practice. It turns out I'm like one of Patrick's voters, right? I just don't. Because curling, for instance, is a sport that I think would have been cut from the Winter Olympics under your rubric. But in fact, it's an incredible sport. And we should all be curling fans

and the US one gold, which is absolutely why I think that now. But you do feel okay about flipping it over to Thomas the tank engine for your son. That will be, that will score if if he enjoyed, if he enjoyed the Ajur Bajani underwear floor ribbon dancers, he will really like Thomas the tank engine. No, he doesn't get to watch that. He only gets to watch the Olympics for the next two weeks. I'm really excited. You run it, you run a tight ship, Mama.

All right, Patrick, can we please get the promise of a full live tweeting as you binge Ted Lasso? I will, I will promise that, yes. All right. Then this has been a successful podcast. Learned a lot. And everyone can now look up also where Azerbaijan is because don't lie to me and say that you know, you didn't, you don't, no. I reject that possibility.

Thank you, Patrick, for joining us. This is a real treat. And again, definitely, definitely, I can't tell you enough. If you liked this podcast even a little bit, you were going to love, freaking love his newsletter, which just, it like goes just story by story by story of great data science out there, good polling data. It's, it's, it is so valuable. I can't emphasize that enough. So thank you, Patrick, for your contribution to my media diet and for joining us today. Thank you so much.

With Amex Platinum, access to exclusive Amex pre-sale tickets can score you as far trackside. So being a fan for life, into the trip of a lifetime. That's the powerful backing of Amex. Pre-sale tickets for future events subject to availability and varied by race. Terms and conditions apply.

Learn more at mx.ca.ca slash Yanex.