The Dispatch Podcast - Polling, What Is It Good For? | Roundtable

Episode Date: November 1, 2024

Sarah is joined by Steve, Jonah, and special guest Steve Kornacki—national political correspondent and polling extraordinaire for NBC News—to discuss the state of the race just four days out from Election Day. The Agenda: —Is polling worth our time? —The Haley-Cheney voters in Wisconsin —Is the race really tied? —The gender gap —Garbage trucks —Will garbage-gate affect turnout? —Predictions Show Notes: —Stirewalt on The Remnant —The Daily Show garbage montage The Dispatch Podcast is a production of The Dispatch, a digital media company covering politics, policy, and culture from a non-partisan, conservative perspective. To access all of The Dispatch’s offerings—including members-only newsletters, bonus podcast episodes, and weekly livestreams—click here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm Sarah Isgur with Steve Hayes, Jonah Goldberg, and y'all aren't going to believe the special guest we have today. That's right. It's Steve Kornacki, fresh from the NBC. Excel spreadsheets where he lives most of the time. They've let him out of the computer. He is on the podcast. Steve Kornacki, thank you for joining us. Sarah, I'm happy to be here.

Thanks having me. I want to just start with what are the misconceptions that you're seeing from folks out there, whether it's about polling or early vote totals or anything else, that you're like, ooh, that's not what I think is happening. I think I look at it just a little differently. and I'm very, I don't trust anybody who's confident right now. And I hear very confident and authoritative-sounding analysis of early voting data

and I can listen to, you know, Democratic, you know, experts and they can stitch together, well, look at this and look at this one. And so, wow, you got something going there. And I can hear the exact same thing from Republicans. And I just, I, the question with the early vote, it just to me is always, are you robbing Peter to pay Paul? You know, it's just essentially, okay, wow, the Republicans suddenly have a ton more people voting early.

Are they banking votes they wouldn't have gotten or are they just going to have that much less support on Election Day? And I feel like the early vote thing has really gotten kind of tied up into the specific Trump-era polarization, you know, meaning we saw in 2020 how Republicans were very hostile to vote by mail because Trump was, Trump's changed his tune. certainly as campaigns changed its tune. And I think that just may be shaping across state lines behavior of voters in terms of, you know,

their willingness to vote early. And it may just scramble the numbers and mean we don't have a good basis for comparison. So I just, I see a lot of early voting talk. And, you know, maybe we'll learn something after the fact. But I'm taking it with a gigantic grain of salt right now. I'm going to turn to all of you on this, but I'll start with you, Kornacki, which is as America just becomes so 50-50. and so polarized but equally polarized

and response rate on polls have gone down polling has missed now several cycles is polling worth our time so to speak like are we done with polling as Americans because it's always going to be so close the mathematical margin of error maybe three points but then you add in the sort of arts part of dark arts part of polling that's going to add another point

point a half maybe so at the point that we have a four and a half percent margin of error on some of these like what good is that poll to me Right. I mean, this year has been different, obviously, just in the, you know, it's been so tight. It wasn't in 20, it wasn't 16. In the polling, obviously, that the final result was different. But, you know, we see averages. We put the average, we have a running average at the state level. The most lopsided battleground state we have right now is 1.6 points. You know, for Donald Trump, we have, you know, four of the seven are with, are a fraction of a point right now. I mean, it's, I know we've talked about we've been in sort of a 50, 50 nation for a long time here. But this is kind of extreme, just at least as it goes with, in terms of the polling. And I think it's, look, if we end up with a series of battleground races that are, you know, 10,000 votes, 5,000 votes, 2,000 votes, the polling will have kind of been valuable in that it really told us, wow, it's closer than ever.

But you always have the possibility, you know, these swing states pretty much have gone, you know, in 2016. Every state, you know, but Nevada that's a swing state now went for Trump in 2020. every state that's a swing state now, except for North Carolina, went for Biden. So they usually end up kind of going one way or the other. And if you do end up with sort of a more decisive result, yeah, I think everybody's coming for the pollsters again. Steve, is the only reason that we talk about polling because we have nothing else to talk about

since it's not helpful? I mean, I think there's plenty to talk about. But people obsess about the polling because it allows, I mean, to a certain extent, this, you know, people have called this a vibes election. I, well, I hate the phrase, I do think that it's apt in some respects because it really is more about sort of how do people feel about these candidates and what do they do than it is about a sort of a hard argument over different ideological priorities. So to a certain extent, people are talking about this because that's one way to try to measure sort of vibes in the direction of the vibes. It also, I think, gives political reporters sort of an excuse if they don't understand the nuances of the policy debates. they don't really need that excuse in this cycle because it's not a policy-heavy election.

But I think a lot of times going back, you know, historically, you see people sort of obsessed about the polls and obsess about the horse race, A, because it's fun. And I say that unapologetically. It's fun to cover. It's fun to follow. And I like to cover the campaign tactics and strategy, but also because the policy, the policy answers are harder to cover. Jonah, polling.

What's it good for? It's funny. I just had a conversation with Starwalt. on my podcast about this, I kind of think, you know, the Madisonian vision of the American way politics is supposed to work was that elections were actually the polling, right? You would actually, that's how you would take the temperature of the people by having constant elections in this country at every level of government.

And I think that we've lost something, not so much, I don't care about people like us following polls. It's the politicians following polls so much. that they're almost always one layer of separation from what they actually believe when they're talking because they're thinking about poll-tested things. And I think you lose something when you don't have politicians willing to go out

and say, this is what I believe, make a case for it, rather than trying to guess what the public already thinks about something and spinning it to fit their position. And I think that one of the real, I mean, look, we now know that this is why you got Trump is a multi-volume book, and we could have a lot of arguments about why we got Trump.

Steve wrote one of them, our Kornacki wrote one of them, I should say. We're calling him Kornacki, not out of disrespect, but keep people from being confused with the other Steve. But one of them is that he doesn't talk like he poll tests everything. And I think there is this sort of sense among a lot of people, sort of like when you get sick of MSG and Chinese food, just when you like they can feel it in our politics and then when they hear someone who says stuff that they may hate or be disgusted by or or put off by they're not paying as much

attention to the text anymore they're paying attention to the subtext that here is a guy who's willing to stick it to the man and i think that is corrosive to sort of civic health steve hayes you had some questions for your colleague over at nbc yeah speaking of um of states that are narrowly divided I'm going to ask you because I'm from Wisconsin, and I'm actually trying to report out a piece on what's happening in Wisconsin. In Wisconsin, it was decided by 20,000 votes last time for the last six elections. It's been decided by less than a point, incredibly tight. It was the place that Kamala Harris first held an in-person event with Liz Cheney, an obvious attempt to go after sort of disaffected Republicans, frustrated Republicans. there was a Marquette University law poll out yesterday that showed Donald Trump has 92% support

among Republicans, but Kamala Harris, 7% of Republicans are telling that pollster right now that they're going to vote for Kamala Harris. It's very clear that this is part of the Harris campaign strategy to target these disaffected Republicans, these movement conservatives. And I wonder if anything that you're seeing either in the polling or as you're talking to people suggest they're having any success at this? Are these people getable? This will undoubtedly be if Kamala Harris loses one of the things that's most heavily scrutinized in the aftermath. Yeah, I mean, I think the big question there is you could also sort of fold in this Nikki Haley vote question, you know, from the primaries. And I, you know, how much of that Nikki Haley vote was actual Republicans,

practicing Republicans? I'll put it that way, versus, you know, how many of them are folks who had access to a Republican primary, but had already voted for Joe Biden in 2020. And, you know, because the, you know, look at where Haley performed the best in the primaries. I mean, it's just so consistent across state lines, higher income, high concentration of college degrees, and it just falls off the cliff when you get into those, you know, more blue collar areas. And those are the areas, obviously, where the Republicans have just bled the most support in the two Trump elections. And they're also the areas where you just see the most motivation outside of presidential elections to vote.

You know, these are folks in these places who will crawl over broken glass for any chance to vote against Donald Trump. So how much of that is what we saw with the Haley vote in the primary, but what they're trying to do, obviously, you know with the Liz Cheney thing, look, you know Wisconsin well,

but I mean, it's a play to build on the momentum that they already have in what you've called the Wow counties for folks who don't know Wisconsin as well as you do. The three outline, the three sort of collar counties of Milwaukee and really Ozaki, and Waukesha.

Waukesha is the biggest. And those are the two that have moved. Now Milwaukee suburbs have remained more Republican than other suburbs around the country, but they have moved pretty dramatically away from Trump. Ozaki's the one I'm going to watch an election act to see if what you're talking about is worked because in 2020, Joe Biden got 43% of the vote

in Ozaki County. And it has the highest concentration outside of where the University of Wisconsin is. has the highest concentration of college degrees of any county in Wisconsin. Biden got up to 43. He lost it by 12. That was the best performance by a Democrat there since Lyndon Johnson, 1964. Is that one that Democrats are actually making more progress in?

They get an inside five points. If they ever win Ozaki, I think it would say the strategy you're talking about certainly hasn't hurt because that's the kind of movement they need in a place like that. Well, and there's a, there was a really interesting tweet thread from Ben, Wickler, who's the chairman of the, or the head of the Wisconsin Democratic Party about what they're doing with these Nikki Haley, Liz Cheney voters. And he said, basically, people are misunderstanding this. It's not about going for actual undecideds. It's about getting committed Republicans, movement conservatives, Reagan conservatives, to not write somebody in, but to cast a vote

for Kamala Harris. And one of the most interesting things, if you go really deep and look at the municipalities, sort of municipality by municipality, in those three, important counties in Wisconsin, is the shift between voters in 2016 who were willing to write somebody in or vote for a third party and voters in 2020 who were not. And while everybody's vote share grew in 2020, there was a demonstrable shift toward Joe Biden. It seems like those people who were thinking about writing somebody in moved. And, you know, the number of people voting for third parties or writing somebody and went from two or three percent in those towns to seven, eight, sometimes 10 percent. And it seems like they're targeting that, sort of that group

plus some. I mean, 75,000 people voted for Nikki Ailey 26 days after she dropped out. And maybe more interesting, 9,700 people voted for Chris Christie in Wisconsin three months after he dropped out, which is probably a purer anti-Trump vote. Jonah? All right. So first of all, what You know, the question that everybody really wants to know is who would win in a fight? You were Harry Enton. Yeah. Well, I'm undefeated in fights because I've never been in one. There's something very zen about that.

So speaking of Harry Anton, my colleague on CNN, who I just realized I had an epiphany on air, sounds like a 1930s gangster movie mobster. like literally see the numbers here see you got me man you hear me it's really it's once you hear it you can't unhear it anyway uh that's neither here nor there um he was making a point that the average error in polls going back i don't know what it was 1980 or 1960 or 2000 but you know for a long time it's about 3.4 the point he was making was that if that error went harris's way she wins in not a massive electoral landslide but in a clear and decisive victory. If you give her 3.4 points, it's all over pretty early on election night.

If you give Trump, ditto, maybe even a bigger landslide, or a bigger victory. And so part of the question is, you know, a probabilistic tie is not necessarily an electoral tie, right? Like, the polls are going to be wrong. We don't know if it's by a lot or a little, but it's going to be wrong, but they're probably going to be wrong in one way. And so, or are they going to be wrong in one way, right? Have people change their models in tandem? Or are their models different in a bunch of different ways? I guess the question is, do you think we're actually going to see it as tied in the returns as we see it tied in the polls?

Well, this is where, you know, I'm going to pull out the oldest cliche in election analysis that it all comes down to turnout. out. But I say it in particular this year because I think that's where the potential for the polling miss, you know, that you're talking about, a couple points in one direction or the other comes in. Because you can see with, let's take Trump, for instance, it's very clear from the polling what it depends on for his coalition to actually emerge. He has voters, a good chunk of his coalition are voters who, either one of these things applies, did not vote in the 2022 midterms did not, and also did not vote in the 2020 presidential election. That's his strongest group of support when you look at past the voting history.

Not voting in 20, not voting in 22, Trump's up double digits with those voters over Harris. Voted in both 20 and the 22 midterms, much more engaged. Harris, that's her strongest group. She's up, I think, about eight points over Trump with that group. Also, we ask in our poll, you know, rate your enthusiasm, one to 10, 10 the highest. Nine to ten is usually our, you know, metric for these are the most, you know, sort of engaged, obviously. Harris, again, nines or tens.

Seven through ten, actually, Harris has the advantage over Trump. One to six, Trump has the big advantage over Harris. And when you look at it demographically, what's behind that is Trump's growth in the polls has come from any combination here, non-white, male, younger, younger really kind of being under 50, start layering those on top of each other. when you look in our poll and you see young, meaning under 50, Hispanic male, Trump's up 13 points over Harris. He's winning that demographic outright.

Meanwhile, female Hispanic is Harris plus 26 over Trump. So a massive, massive gender gap there. And they're better propensity voters, right? Female. Exactly. It's traditionally speaking, the coalition that Harris has is more dependable than the coalition that Trump has. If he's able to pull it off and actually convert what's in the polls into support on

election day, then this is a very different coalition, I think, than we've seen before, you know, from Republican candidate and a little bit George W. Bush 04. But that's it. And if these voters, a lot of them have not voted in the past, despite having opportunities to do so, and if they end up saying, eh, whatever, I kind of like Trump, but there it is. There's the turnout disparity that causes the poll error that gives this to Harris. Can you also follow up on Jonah's point of whether you think the different polling companies that have obviously, they don't want to miss, have adjusted their magic formulas all sort of in the same direction to account for the 2020 miss. And footnote, right, 2020 actually had a larger polling miss

than 2016, except that it was still correct in terms of outcome. And so we don't think of it as being a bigger polling miss. It doesn't feel like as big a polling miss. compared to 2016, where it was a relatively small miss, but it missed who the president was going to be. Are they correcting all in the same direction? Are they correcting in different ways so that we're having different formulas out there, which of course would be, I think, everyone's preference? Yeah, no, there's variance. And I think they're all kind of, the miss in 16 and 20 was so sort of demographically specific and even geographically specific. You know, polling in Georgia in 2020. Actually, it wasn't that bad. Polling in Wisconsin and Michigan in 2020 was terrible.

you know, and 16. It's that miss of the blue-collar white voters, that northern tier of battlegrounds where they're just a huge chunk of the population. And they were still voting Democratic until very recently, just the extent of Trump's support there, both times not caught in the polls. Now, I'll give you an example here. We went and we talked to the folks at Quinnipiac, you know, one of the pollsters, Quinnipiac University. They still do, they do something different than old school. A lot of other pollsters have moved on from this, but they do what's called random digit dialing. You know, they get all their callers in the room, a phone number pops up on their screen

at random. They have to punch it in. There's a law they can't do the robocalls. They have to physically punch in the phone number. And it takes them. I mean, I talk to some of the folks there. I mean, it's crazy when you look at it. They said they do a four-hour shift in a good night.

A really good night, they get two interviews done in four hours. It's considered a successful night if they get one. And a lot of them get zero and they just go fishing again the next day. I mean, that's, that is what it's added. But the change that they made in Quinnipiac had, I mean, look, they're not alone. I'm not singling them out here. But if you look back at their 2020 polls, you had some pretty substantial misses there. What they believe and what their poll director says is that they got Trump voters,

this kind of Trump voter were describing on the phone in 2020, but that that voter hesitated to say they were for Trump. Whatever reason you want to give to it, hesitated to say it. So they've added a layer this time around where when somebody's like, eh, you they're a little wishy-washy is a second prompt of, you know, something to sort of say, look, if you really have to, I'm just paraphrasing here, if you really have to make a decision here, who do you think, you know, they push him sort of like that. And he says that's where they're getting more trumps than they've gotten in the past. And it bears out in their polling.

You know, they're polling in the past, always had Trump behind pretty substantially in some cases. They're polling this year has had Trump slightly ahead in some cases, even in the others. So he thinks they've addressed it that way. That's, you know, there's others that have gone out of different ways. And will you pronounce the polling company because you're from Massachusetts, so I'm going to trust your pronunciation more than my own. I've been saying, and now I'm not even sure what I've been saying. Quinnipiac, how are you saying it?

I said Quinnipiac, Connecticut, you know, just outside New Haven. I know it from obscure college basketball games. That's how they say it on the air. Okay, thank you. Just wanted to clear that up. Bobcats. Jonah, did you? Yeah, I mean, so part of my question before about the error in the polling,

do you think that the swing states are all going to go in one direction? Or do you think that it's going to be, you know, it's like a lot of these tie scenarios, all these tie scenarios depend on Nebraska 2. But Nebraska 2, Harris is up like 8 there. So like the idea that she's, you know, that if she loses Nebraska 2, She's lost a lot of other stuff already, so therefore it's not going to be a tie, right? But tie is political nerd porn, so everyone wants to talk about tie. But just generally speaking, do you think the day after the election, it's going to look more like 2000 with Florida, where it really was kind of a tie boiled down to one state?

Or do you think it's going to look more like, say, 2020, where actually, the results were pretty clear but they were narrow enough that there was a big fight about it. I wish I had a good answer here in part because I wish I had a strong hunch about that and this is sort of the first election I can remember going into

where I did not have inside a pretty clear gut feeling about where it was going. The gut feeling in the past hasn't always been right. It would have said Clinton in 2016 but generally the gut feelings matched up with what's happened And I just, there are some days when I think the kind of polling miss I just described working in Harris' favor is going to happen. You know, there are other days when I think that that blue-collar white support is going to come in, you know, on fire for Trump.

And I mean, I look at all these states in three categories, very quickly here, a state like Wisconsin or Michigan or Pennsylvania, I look at three categories. They've all gotten more red since Trump came along. There are portions of those states, densely populated portions, that have actually. in that time, gotten much more blue. So I want to measure those areas against the portions of the state that have not just gotten more red in 2016 when Trump came along, but got even more red

in 2020, sort of a blue surge, red surge comparison. Is there any kind of a turnout disparity that we're seeing there? And then there's that in-between category where Trump made big gains in 16 and gave back a little bit in 2020, and that's where these states are won and loss. We talk about Wisconsin. Tell me about

Brown County, out of Gamee County, Winnebago County, the Bough counties, Green Bay, Appleton, Oshkosh, Trump got up to like, you know, 10 point wins in these states in 2016, came down to like five, six. Is it back up at 10? I think that's, you know, that's working in Trump's favor. Is it still where it was? I think that's working in Harris. But I wish I had a good answer for you. I could paint either scenario. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. Squarespace is the platform that helps you create a polished professional home online. Whether you're building a site for your business, your writing, or a new project, Squarespace brings everything

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All seamlessly integrated. Go to Squarespace.com slash dispatch for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code dispatch to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. All right. So let's fast forward a couple days here. It's election night. What are your bellwethers? So an early, early one is at six o'clock hour eastern. We get Indiana and Kentucky, or we should, we'll see how fast they are. Non-competitive states, but we've been talking about

this suburban phenomenon. The earliest measure of that is Hamilton County County in Indiana. Bedroom communities just north of Indianapolis, rapidly growing. And it just demographically, it typifies what we were describing as that. growth area for Democrats, high concentration of college degrees, higher income, all these sorts of things. And you can just see it. In 2012, Mitt Romney against Barack Obama, Hamilton County, Mitt Romney won it by 33 points. 2016, Trump comes along down to 19. 2020, down to seven. Are the Democrats flipping Hamilton County in 2024? If they are, I think that's a very good sign, not in Indiana, obviously, but that's a sign. There's a lot of Hamilton counties

in swing states that we're going to be looking at. We talked about Ozaki in Wisconsin. If I see Hamilton flipping over, I know right away, oh, I think there's a real chance here that Ozaki is going to continue that move towards Democrats. Another early one I'm going to look at, I was going to look at this anyway, but now in light of recent events, it's even more. Seven o'clock, Florida, again, we're not expecting it to be competitive, but of all the big states, Florida is the most efficient vote-counting state.

So, I mean, in that first hour, we could get complete results in some of these counties in Florida. I'm going to key in on Osceola County, which is just south of Orlando. I was going to do this anyway because it's one of three majority Hispanic counties in Florida. And unlike, you know, when you look at South Florida and Miami-Dade in particular, obviously heavily Hispanic too, it's a little distinct politically because of the high Cuban-American population, which has a sort of a different political caste than other Hispanic subgroups. Asiola, though, and this is where I say recent events come in, one third of Osceola County is Puerto Rican. It's the highest concentration of Puerto Rican voters of any county in Florida. And it's a place where, again, Donald Trump

made double-digit gains. It was blue in 2020, but Trump improved by 11 points relative to 2016 in Osceola County. He made real gains with Hispanic voters and with Puerto Rican voters in Osceola County. And his campaign has been banking on further gains with those voters, not just in Florida, but elsewhere. So obviously, in light of all that, you know, noise this week, is there, has he paid a price or is he continuing to grow in Osceola? Because his campaign, certainly prior to Sunday, would have said continuing, well, I still say now, but continuing to grow in Osceola County.

So that's, I think, an early test of that. I just want to tell listeners at this point that we didn't give Steve any of these questions in advance. He didn't get to script any of this. It certainly sounds like, I don't. think I heard a single um or hesitation. We didn't cut anything. I'm, I know you're great. I watch you, but I will admit I'm sitting here a little bit blown away anyway. And by the way, I did bring up your Wikipedia page just to see what it says. And Joan, I mean, it reads pretty similarly

to your Wikipedia page. Here, I'll just read a sentence. Following his work on the 2020 United States presidential election, Kornacki was named by people as one of the sexiest men alive with his use of Gap khakis, eventually becoming a fashion trend on its own, colloquially referred to as Cornackie khakis. What a life, Steve Kornacki. I guess my real question out of all of this is you now are the man for everything from NFL, the Olympics, the Kentucky Derby, and presidential elections, and midterms, of course. What is your Christmas when you have so many days to open presents and events? around the year. Is this Christmas for you?

First of all, the People magazine thing was the real vote fraud in 2020. I can tell you that. I'm sure you've never used that line before. No, I got it ready. I'm waiting for the moment there. The answer is honestly, is no, and it's only because I feel so much more anxiety. There's just so much more to juggle. And, you know, I always say, you know, 99% of the research, you know, Just my desk, if you could see it here, is just fill with folders and stuff. 99% of it will never make air. And you just, but you need to prepare because all these contingencies on election night, you're never expecting. I've got a folder that just says, you know, it's my break glass folder because we focus on the seven battlegrounds.

But what if New Hampshire gets interesting? You know, what it's so got to be ready for those too. And so I just, every time I think of election night, I just think of all the different things I could possibly be hit with. and it can get overwhelming. And I guess that versus like, you know, I get to do the Kentucky Derby. It's like, it's fun. I just, I love horse racing.

So it's just I get to live in like, you know, horse racing for a month. And, you know, I can present the stuff that I present on air, I have rehearsed ahead of time and I've researched. And, you know, the only thing I've, you know, the risk for me is when they have me make the pick. And I got one right. Which you got right.

Yeah. They later disqualified the horse. horse, but I kept the money, so yeah. Yeah, I mean, you're not supposed to know if the horse has been taking drugs. That's right. If you do and you don't pick them, you get a whole other thing going on. Just a very quick question. And you don't have to name names, though. Obviously, we prefer if you name names. Have anybody gotten from any campaign, this campaign or previous campaigns, taking your read of numbers incredibly personally and tried to work, tried to try to tried to work you to like as like an appeal of either intimidation or or favoritism to like change

your numbers um or or to recant your numbers i mean is how much working of the refs goes on behind the scenes you not that you would ever cave to any of it yeah no and i'm just i'm thinking it through and you know honestly it's like um i'm thinking in 2020 you know we had five days basically a five day election there until pennsylvania got called and not a not a ton Not there's, you know, there's, there's not a ton. There wasn't. And, you know, I think there's, the stuff I've gotten has been more in the pre-election period when you're living more in, you know, I can think of a, you know, midterm election

where there's something a couple years ago. But I've also like, I mean, we talked about polls at the start of this thing. And I think because they've been so consistent and they're so consistently narrow, I've made a conscious decision to back off a little bit. I mean, we have an NBC poll, you know, I present all the NBC. see polls. We'll check in with poll averages here and there. But I've, in the past, I've, I've lived by the, here's today's new poll. What could it possibly mean? And you end up with totally contradictory narratives one day, followed it. And I backed off from that this time and just kind of accepted what

I said. I don't trust confidence. I see turnout scenarios. And I'm as curious as anybody what's going to happen. Our colleague, Chris Darwold, has some stories about people trying to work him when he was at Fox. But that's another conversation. Okay. Do you know Scott Hansen over at NFL Red zone? Definitely no of them. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So he has this whole, like, thing where basically he's like, I don't drink water for six days, so I'm fully dehydrated by the time Sunday comes around. So I won't need to take bathroom breaks. Like, do you have any rituals that you'll be doing on election day that we can think of you pre, you know, seeing you on our TV? I take a long walk between about 1.30 and 3.30

just to clear my head and avoid all of the election day anecdotal reports you're getting that are even more useless than early voting stuff. All right. Steve Kornacki, NBC News. You can watch them on election night. Thank you so much for joining us. This was wildly informative.

This was fun. Thanks for having me. All right, guys. So that was super fun. And I don't know, like as a campaign operative, former campaign operative, I can get kind of snobby about talking to people, about what they actually are looking at and reading ahead of time, especially reporters who I think don't necessarily know how campaigns judge these things. But man, he's blowing it all away. Steve, what do you think of his answer on your Liz Cheney, Nikki Haley, Republicans clenching it? I did like his phrase, practicing Republicans. Yeah, I mean, look, I thought it was really.

really interesting. I mean, you know, as you pointed out in the interview, which I don't think anybody would describe as hard hitting. I mean, there was a lot of, you know, there was fan girling and fanboying going on, I think, because he is so smart. It's like, it is fun to sort of talk to somebody who's kind of obviously at the top of this game. But I thought I was struck by a couple things. One, I think he's right about the question on Wisconsin and in particular on, you know, those Nikki Haley, Liz Cheney, January 6th voters. I've been one of these mythical pieces I've been reporting. That's what I'm spending the last days of the campaign on is trying to figure out

it doesn't matter. Why are they focusing on it the way that they are? And some of this is projection, right? Because I think those voters are me, right? I'm not going to vote for Donald Trump. If I were in Wisconsin, what I vote for Kamala Harris, what I write somebody in. I think these are the questions that a lot of people are wrestling with in Wisconsin. I've spoken to Wisconsin voters now.

the past month who walk me through this. Certainly some people, there are definitely Joe Biden voters in 2020 among movement conservatives, disaffected Republicans who are saying, I'm not doing it with Kamala. I don't feel comfortable with her. I can't trust her. She's not really made any policy overtures. And the idea that they voted for in 2020 with Joe Biden was that there would be at least the possibility of some return to normalcy. seems not to be a compelling reason for them to vote for Kamala this time around. On the other hand, I've spoken to, I've spoken to, you know, Republicans, former Republicans who are eager to vote for Kamala because they need to lodge their protests once again against Donald Trump.

I thought that what he said about watching Hamilton County, Indiana, was really interesting because while it is the case that Indicate is not going to be competitive in the presidential race, it might be surprisingly competitive in the gubernatorial race, which I think people hadn't necessarily counted on. You know, there are cities in places like Indiana that look like cities or feel like cities elsewhere in the sort of upper Midwest. And to look at Hamilton County in Indiana because of demographic trends that are maybe not mirror exactly, but are at least close to some of the trends that we've seen in places like

Ozaki County, Wisconsin, I think is really smart. And I will now be paying attention to both Hamilton County, Indiana and Osceola County, Florida, because of what he said. Jonah, biggest takeaways before we hop into other news of the week. I just thought completely dodge my question about who went in a fight with Harry Anton. Yeah, that was ridiculous. Harriet, by the way, I do have to give a shout out, too. He's the guy, like, when I see his byline on something,

I read it word for word very slowly because I think he is brilliant on this stuff. Yeah, I mean, it's funny. I have to say, I mean, I think N's great. I think Karnacki's great. Basically, like, the polling stuff, the actual people who live and breathe and work on that beat, they're all pretty good because I think in part because...

First of all, the competition for those slots is intense. And unlike a lot of normal journalism, there are objective metrics that one can apply about whether or not someone is actually good at it. And so you tend to get people who are good at it. And like Nate Cohn, I mean, they all have perfectly intellectually honest caveats about why they're taking the position that they take and why they're looking at the numbers the way they're looking at them. But I do think that Cronachie is about a zero.

good as you can get at that stuff, you know, on the big board and all that. I don't blame him for not having an answer about whether or not the swing states are going to move in tandem or move separately. But I kind of suspect, I increasingly have a gut feeling that it's not going to be a nail biter, which doesn't mean it's not going to be close in the popular vote. And it doesn't mean that these polls are wrong. It's just that if they're wrong in anything close to the same direction, when it's this like if let's just say for the sake of argument it's so tied that it's a one vote difference between them like you could see all you need is a tiny shift in the wind to make all those states go one way for almost all those states you know like i think north carolina

Vegas and georgia are kind of outliers but like you could see the the rust belt states going uh all together for harris really really easily. To your point, to your point, if the polls are wrong, they could be wrong by under one point, which would be a polling win. It would mean the polls were incredibly accurate. But if they're all wrong within one

point in the same direction, this will not have been a close race because when you win a state by more than one percentage point, that's the ball game. There's no recount happening. There's no thousands and thousands and thousands of votes that can't be made up. Yeah. That's right.

So, you know, I think back to 2012, and my job, of course, was to prepare for recounts in whatever it was at that point, eight states, 10 states. I think Florida was 1.2%, North Carolina was about 1.5%. This was a blowout in that sense in every state. And I don't think people necessarily realize that 1% the ball game. It's not a close race at that point. What we're really looking for for recounts, credible recounts, under half a percentage point. If it's between half a percentage point and one percentage point, oftentimes some of the states, they will allow the campaign to pay for a recount, for instance. There's a reason they think of it that way. It's like, look, you're really not going to be able to

change it. If it's over half a percentage point, that's still tens and tens of thousands of votes. But if you know, if you think something's really, if you just want to sleep better at night, whatever, know what the real number is, like, that's fine. It's the under half a percentage point that we don't really know who won at that point. Yeah. The other thing that I think he downplayed for the sake of entirely laudable, journalistic, even-handedness is the difference in bets between these two campaigns. Like the Trump campaign, I mean, he laid it out,

but I just don't think, because he sounds so calm and reassuring that people really realize what he's saying, the Trump campaign is making a massive, massive, colossal, epical bet that a bunch of young dudes who've never voted before, even for Trump, are going to turn out so massively that they are going to erase the advantage Harris has with women who have voted before, including in midterms. And if you talk to, I talked to a bunch of Democratic consultant types in the last few days because I've been at CNN so much. and um like if you had to like you know when you're choosing teams for for for softball when you're a kid or

whatever the i don't mean this pejoratively but like young 20 something white dudes and really 20 something and 30 something blacks and Hispanics males are the kids you'd pick last for your team if you could put together a coalition What did that feel like, Jonah? Picking those kids last? I felt bad about it, but, you know. Did you stand there by yourself, just longing to be picked? Not only are women higher propensity voters, as you're noting, Jonah, they are more likely to vote.

They consider it part of their character and personality to be a voter. They're also more of voters. About 52% of the electorate is female. So there's more of them to pick from, everything about, they're also wildly disproportionately plugged into social networks in civil society so they know how to move other people to vote you know because they smell better yeah partly but you think about this is like in all seriousness Steve you'll remember this from back in the your day when you were young I suppose when they called you back in your day I mean when you think about

get out the vote efforts back in the 80s when you were in I don't know college or something it was all women right that's like the republican backbone it was republican old republican women who were all the you know get out the vote efforts working the you know phone banks and all of that stuff um and that's really shifted as the polling or sorry the voter realignment has shifted i've got a quick one before we go on to garbage trucks um and wait i have another point i have but hold on i i have a question for you do you all think that the i think the voter realignment around education is real and permanent for Republicans and Democrats. I am not at all convinced that the gender realignment is real and permanent between Republicans and Democrats.

I think that it will be very hard for a 28 Republican candidate for president, whoever it is, to appeal to male voters in the same way that Trump does. I mean, just like literally run through some names. And I think you'll see the problem quite quickly. Do you all think the gender gap is an actual permanent fixture in politics or a 2024 Trump fixture? I mean, it's an extension of something that we'd already seen, right? The gender gap isn't new right now. It wasn't new in 2020. It wasn't new in 2016.

So it's an extension. I mean, it's accelerated. It's bigger than I mean, I remember the George H.W. Bush cover of what was the Time of Newsweek, the Wimp Factor. Right? It's been a thing for a while. Anyway, of course you do because you're so old, as Sarah did not point out in your case. No, I actually buy your analysis on that. I think the shift in education is much more likely to be enduring than the kind of shift we've seen on the gender question.

Let me go back to Jonah's point real quickly, though, because I think he's right that the Trump campaign is making this sort of epochal bet on these young males. They're not doing it without reason. If you talk to people sort of in and around Trump world, Republican consultants who have worked on, you know, these races over the past six, eight years, particularly 2020, 2022 and are working on this one, there are stories, particularly in Republican primaries of this sort of hidden young mail vote just kind of popping up magically out of nowhere to win primaries. in some cases for people who have backed Donald Trump. So I think now it's entirely possible that this might not be as widespread as the Trump campaign thinks it is, that it may not be as powerful as the Trump campaign thinks it is. But I don't think it's just a sort of random like stab. It is they're looking at things that they've seen over the past couple of cycles and saying

this is a place that we can plus up our vote. At the same time, I think that it's also the case, and there's been a lot of sort of mocking speculation about this, that Democrats going after this sort of secret female vote, women who don't want to tell their husbands that they're supporting Donald Trump, that they didn't come up with that out of thin air either. I think that there are specific anecdotes and specific patterns where they have seen this. Either canvassers who are outdoor knocking have gotten these kinds of responses or they've seen certain indications in early vote totals that suggest that this might be getable. But I don't think you're seeing them make that play based on a hunch. They're looking at things. Now, they may be wrong.

They might be wrong. It might not be as important as they seem to think it is. but I think they're seeing things or hearing anecdotes that support that kind of an approach. Would you lie to your spouse about who you voted for? I don't let him my spouse. Do you think she would ever lie to you about who she voted for? I don't think so. Don't know.

Would Jessica lie to you about who she voted for? No, she'd accused me of lying, but there's no way she would lie with me. She would harangue me about who to vote for. but we actually had quite a long conversation last night about all the different scenarios of what would be better for us, the country, the dispatch, servicism, and we went through every scenario,

and it was pretty depressing. I feel very confident in my what is best for the country because I think that's realistic. Basically, I want divided government. I think that's what's best for the country. I don't think there's a realistic scenario where Trump wins the White House and Democrats take the Senate and the House. That's not going to happen.

But it is realistic scenario for Harris to take the White House and Republicans to take the Senate and the House. And I think that could actually force both sides to the table potentially, whereas I think if, for instance, Harris won the presidency, Republicans won the Senate and Democrats got the House back, I actually think it would just continue to be miserable for two years and they would wait it out for a more favorable Senate map and see if they could get the Senate in 26 rather than compromise with Republicans. I think she'd be under a lot of pressure not to work with Republican senators at that point. They'd just wait for judges. They'd wait on any legislative stuff because the map is

better for Democrats in 26 in the Senate. Anyone have a different take on sort of the best for the country scenario that you'd like. It's realistic, right? Realistic? Yeah, no. Sweet meteor of death isn't coming. We would know by now, you know? Yeah.

Unless NORAD's really falling down on the job. Let's talk garbage. It is wild to me that the closing statements, this election cycle, were the October surprise in the sense that they stepped on their own closing. statements so badly with their surrogates that all we're talking about is how the reverse of their closing statements. So Trump goes to Madison Square Garden trying to make a pitch for, as you say, I mean, largely men or a masculine victory for America and has a comedian who tells a joke that's not all that clever about how there's a large floating garbage pile out

in the ocean. And it's Puerto Rico. And it totally stopped. steps on Trump's message. The one thing that men don't like, I mean, I think there's a lot of things y'all don't like, but generally speaking, it's to be mocked and belittled, right? So really unhelpful for Trump. He had to distance himself from that comment, which Trump never does, which should tell you how potentially damaging they thought that was. So you would think someone would have learned something as the Harris campaign is gleefully celebrating about this unforced error from the Trump campaign. So she gives her closing statement. It has her to-do list about how she'll be a president for all Americans, about how Trump has an enemy's list, but she has a to-do list. And then Joe Biden

gives a Nothing Burger Zoom call with Voto Latino that is meandering and not very easy to understand. And so let's listen, actually, to exactly what Joe Biden then said while Harris was giving her closing statement. The only garbage I see float down there is his supporters, his demonization is seen as unconscionable. The White House tries to claim there's an apostrophe there that he meant Trump's supporters joke, yada, yada, yada. The Trump supporters singular joke, right? That was the, that's the controversy, yeah. Replace supporter with the name of the comedian, and that's the claim that they're making. Right. Fine. I won't tell people what they should think about whether that was accurate or, or what he meant or what he didn't mean. But it's now consumed this closing statement period,

so much so that Trump then shows up in a garbage truck driving around and a little, you know, caution vest or whatever at his rally. They're trying to make hay out of it. I guess this goes to my point about the vibes election, Steve. I know you don't like it. The policies aren't that different. And now I'm going to argue that even the vibes aren't that different. There's a reason that both sides jumped on the other's error because it's so easy for voters to believe that the other team hates them, really despises them and loathes them.

So it's not surprising to Democrats that Trump thinks Puerto Ricans are garbage. And it's not surprising to Republicans that Harris, Biden, et cetera, think of them as garbage. That's a sad place to be. Yeah, it is a sad place to be. And it's not a surprising place to be, right?

I mean, we've sort of seen whatever this thing was at the end of this campaign, we knew it was going to be something dispiriting and discouraging like this, right? I mean, it wasn't going to be like we had a final discussion on the role of America in the world, and that was going to be the thing that determined the election. It was going to be something stupid like this, and it was sort of obvious. I have to say, I mean, so on the comment itself, I think this was one sort of rare moment where Jonah and I really saw things differently

or I came to this, I heard that one way and Jonah heard it, Jonah was more open-minded. I mean, I think you can hear in the way that his voice goes down that he's saying that Trump supporters are garbage. The only way you can suggest that it's, that he was actually talking about the comedian is if you think he was reading something

and just misread it, but even that doesn't make sense to me. It seems very obvious. And it was, I thought it was revealing how many journalists immediately went into spin mode for Joe Biden at that moment. As I say, I leave open the possibility, small one, though I think it is, that he misread it and therefore it didn't, he didn't mean it as it very clearly sounded to me. but I think the easiest explanation is like he was calling Trump supporters garbage. I think this could matter.

You know, it's easy at the end of these campaigns where, you know, you're in the sort of flinging poo stage of our modern political contests to shrug it all off and say that it doesn't matter. I think in some respects, this could matter. What Kamala Harris has spent time doing trying to reach out to these disaffection, Republicans. And there's no question that that was not just sort of part of her strategy over the past six weeks, but at the heart of her strategy over the past six weeks. She is trying to appeal to those people. It's why she gave the speech she gave at the ellipse. It's why she gave a relatively

conciliatory speech at the Democratic National Commission. It's why she spent a bunch of time with Liz Cheney. It's why they've activated these Republicans for Harris groups. They think that a key part to their victory is getting these disaffected Republicans to cast a ballot for Kamala Harris, affirmatively. And I think what a lot of these Republicans were looking for is, hey, can you tell me something that gives me some assurance that you won't just be a continuation of Joe Biden, that you won't make promises that you're returning things to normal, you won't be divisive, and then talk about Jim Crow 2.0 and really not fulfill those promises.

And I think she's gone more or less out of her way to offer reassurances that she won't do that. But when it comes to specifics, there isn't much. I was watching a video of this guy I spent time with for this Wisconsin piece. I'm doing Sean Riley, who's the mayor of Waukesha, Wisconsin, longtime Republican with the party on January 6th because he was so frustrated with what happened on January 6th. he's still the serving mayor of Waukeshael, Wisconsin, which is at the heart of this red county that we've been talking about. He did an appearance with Tim Walz. And Sean Riley, the mayor of Waukesha gets up and says, I'm going to vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. Donald Trump is terrible. The way he's taking the Republican Party is awful. January 6th was

really bad and sort of makes this case and then turns it over to Tim Walz. And Wals then says, you know, thanks Mayor Riley. We agree. January 6th was bad, Donald Trump was bad, and here are the specific policy reasons you should vote for me and Kamala Harris and, you know, goes into policies that will undoubtedly excite the Democratic base. I think if you're a Republican listening to that and you're looking for those assurances that you will have a seat at the table that there might be some compromise, you hear that and you say, boy, this sounds just like the kind of boilerplate. Democratic policies in the past.

Yep. I mean, this is why I think Walt's in hindsight. Look, if Harris loses, I really believe that the blame has to fall with Joe Biden for deciding to run again and then having to drop out Democrats not being able to have a primary where I don't think they would have picked Harris, but if nothing else, it would have given them a year to sort of sand out some rough edges, actually vet vice presidential candidates, all of that. But even short of that, you know, if you want to look at the more micro-strategic decision,

picking Walt's was, I think, a huge mistake because he's completely unable to shift strategies if they needed to shift strategies, like wanting to reach the not-practicing Republicans to borrow Kornacki's phrase. And this is such a good example, but he's done it over and over again. Like when he went on the Daily Show

and he's asked about Liz Cheney and he basically giggles and is like, don't worry, she won't have anything to do with our administration. Well, that totally undermines the whole point of doing these events. He only speaks far left-wing progressive, unlike a Shapiro. I mean, it's just stunning. She didn't pick Shapiro.

Shapiro is very fluent in many languages, including conservative. I don't say that about a lot of elected Democrats. In fact, I'm hard-pressed to think of more than one or two others, who I think actually can speak fluent conservative, but he's one of them. And then it turns out she needed someone who could. No shock there. Jonah, thoughts, feelings about garbage. Do you like garbage?

Steve outrageously accused me of being more open-minded and fair-minded than him, and I need to respond to that. I will say, my initial response on Twitter was not following my own advice of don't respond immediately to these kinds of things. I was trying to make the point, and I did it badly, that this will be a blue-dress, gold-dress kind of thing, where if you're inclined to think well of them, you're just going to, first of all, Let's be clear. He comes across in that thing as incoherent and unfit to be president. He shouldn't be president. He's a mess, right? And so I kind of grade people on how they talk when they're slurring their words and pretty incoherent.

A little, maybe too generously. Maybe Steve is right. I'm just a big hearted, nice guy. And I shouldn't be. That said, I have just some other disagreements on all. of this stuff. And I've always said it's perfectly fair to read him as saying, because it's plain text to what he says is what he says. And what he says is the Trump's supporters are garbage. I think this matters not a bit in terms of moving voters, getting voters to change a vote.

I think it is very useful for Trump, forget out the vote, that the kind of dude bros who feel like men are looked down upon in a society and, you know, forgotten man. calling who you call on garbage right that kind of helps for motivating votes i suspect and i i'm not staking out a bold claim here or making a bet but if i had to bet i would argue that the calling the porto ricans uh puerto rico a garbage island is more more likely to move votes that matter this thing is like and let's take a step back just for two seconds calling people just all things being equal, calling an ethnicity garbage is different than calling people who support a person that you think is unfit to be president, who you think is kind of stolen election.

You shouldn't say it. You shouldn't paint with that kind of broad brush, but like it's, you know, it's like the difference between saying these immigrants are poisoning the blood of America simply by virtue of being the wrong ethnicity versus saying the Trumpists are poisoning the minds of. of America because of their horrible rhetoric. I mean, I just think they're different things. Well, can I also add on that? Like, this is what makes, I think,

y'all's argument about what Biden meant, that he meant Trump supporters are garbage. If you believe that Trump is Hitler, then I guess I'm confused why you're now pushing back on the idea that people who support Hitler are garbage. Like, don't you think people who support Hitler are garbage? I tend to. So if then Trump is Hitler, I mean,

I took the else out a long time ago, but it feels like a pretty easy logic game to me. Yeah, but so this, I mean, this gets the point I've been trying to make for a while now is at the heart of so much of this garbage, so to speak, is that everyone works from the assumption that they see Trump, that other people sees Trump the exact same way they do. So if you see a fascist and then you hear people saying nice things about him, you say, oh, you must think he's a, you must think fascists are nice, but they don't see him as a Right. And so this is the, the Democrats, the very Biden and Harris, who are saying Trump is a Nazi, that saying Trump is Hitler, then accidentally or, you know, say the line about the Trump supporters being garbage. And they're like, no, no, that's obviously not what we meant. How could you think we meant that? It's like, well, because. You know, there's a serious tension there. I grant you that. But anyway, back to the Puerto Rico, it is going very viral. It's not getting like, you know, it's getting. It's getting. It's getting. some coverage, but it's going very viral in, like, Allentown, which is a heavy, huge Puerto Rican

population, all the Spanish language radio stations there, the big Spanish language radio stations run by Puerto Ricans. The DJs have been going nuts on it. The Spanish language, Puerto Rican Instagram with Jennifer Lopez and Bad Bunny, who's got some new name out. I didn't even know who Bad Bunny was a week ago. They're going crazy about it. Those voters are late voters because they're really not politically engaged. And the idea that in a state that could come down to a difference of five or 10,000 votes, that you're going to piss off a specific ethnic group that is essentially a swing vote, that could actually matter in a way that calling people, you know, generically saying Trump supporters are garbage, does not move anybody. I do think that the... Right, if one side,

this is my point about the only two ways you win elections, you get people to vote who weren't going to vote or you change someone's vote from one candidate to another. The changing votes is worth two in some sense. The getting someone to vote is worth one. So the garbage comment is worth one. It's a turnout mechanism. The Puerto Rico comment could be a one because it could mean they stay home when they were going to vote or it could actually change votes in which case it's worth two, which makes it different. Yeah. Yeah, although I didn't finish, I didn't finish my argument even though I went on for quite a long time. The reason, part of the reason I think the garbage quote, I mean, look,

Nick had a very good newsletter about this yesterday. On the surface, it's absurd. Like, Trump has been calling Kamala and her supporters garbage for months and saying things that are much, much worse. All of this stuff. And the sort of pearl clutching by Trump supporters over this is totally preposterous. But they see an advantage. I think the reason the gar, and it was Joe Biden who said Garbage, not Kamala Harris.

The reason that it could have an effect is because she has made this effort to convince these disaffected ours that they can sort of trust her. Like, hey, you'll have a seat at the table. I will listen to you. Look at me. I'm being nice to Liz Cheney. I'm touring. I've got Jeff Flake, Senator from Arizona, former Senator.

from Arizona doing events for me. You can, you can trust me to do these things. Yeah. And then it's like, here's what they really think about you. Now, she, you know, sort of somewhat distanced herself from Biden the next day. But it was sort of like, eh, he clarified. And, you know, I meant what I said. And it was, you know, it was in a, in a minute by minute news cycle, it was 12, 15 hours later. I think she had an opening to come out that night and say, hey, wait a second, we shouldn't be calling each other garbage. And I just gave this entire speech premised on that fact. And I love Joe Biden for picking me as his running mate for allowing me to serve. I'm honored. He's served well. Say whatever you want about Joe Biden and then say, but he's just flat wrong. And we're never going to get beyond this

moment if we keep doing the kinds of things that my boss, Joe Biden, just did. And, you know, I, Sister Soldier moments can be overrated, but that would have been one. And I think it could have been a pretty effective one. No, I think the same point in CNN yesterday that this was actually a gift from Biden in a certain way. I mean, it's not a gift they wanted that stepped on their message. But like, here was an opportunity to say, look, first of all, look, one of the things about the way she distanced herself really bothers me where she says, I don't think you should criticize people for how they vote. Sure, you can criticize people for how they vote. You shouldn't call them garbage, right?

There's a difference between, like, demonization and dehumanization and civil. discourse, disagreement. And so she should have, like, the phrase should have been, I don't believe in dehumanizing people or demonizing people because of how they vote. But of course, we can disagree about how to vote. That's what elections are all about. I can't, I can't say how much I resent being put into like wordsmith for politicians mode with these people, but they're so bad at it.

That said, she should have just said, you know, she should have done some big, look, I love Joe. I personally don't think he meant what, it sounds. like you said, but I can understand why people would be angry about it. But that's the politics, whether you meant it or not, that's the politics of the past. That's the kind of politics I'm trying to get out of, that I'm trying to move this country beyond, where we don't call people garbage or scum like Donald Trump has done. And then list all the things that Donald Trump has said as, you know, evidence to show the hypocrisy of all this pearl clutching from, you know, Fox types.

I mean, Daily Show ran a clip of all of these Foxx. hosts talking about, you know, with, you know, more in sorrow than in anger, but it really sounds like Joe Biden really does think half this country is garbage and, and he's demonizing people and he's using the language of hate. I mean, like over and over and over again. And then they would cut to Trump saying, the Democrats are scum. They're the worst form of scum. They're criminals. Frankly, they don't deserve to lit, you know, like all this kind of stuff. And then they cut back to another Fox host saying, I'm really disturbed by this kind of troubling rhetoric from Joe Biden. I mean, like, I have a hard time. This is such an unbelievably stupid moment

that we're in right now. And I agree with you entirely. It's almost, it's not even Tom Wolfish. It's like Pilgrim's Progress allegory time where the election is ending on the theme of garbage is just it's so on the nose that it it kind of makes me feel like the writer's room is just screwing with it. All right, well, this is our last dispatch pod before the election.

You'll have any predictions to make? It doesn't have to be who will win, but I'm sure listeners would like to know what you think about that. I'll go first, which is there's different ways to judge the end of a campaign, and I think I've talked about this a lot when I mentioned 2016,

and I thought Clinton would win until about the Friday before the election when you're listening to this probably because of a few things. One, she went to Michigan and I just thought, oh my goodness, her internal polling, like you would never go to Michigan at this point. Time is your most valuable resource. She's not just like up by a point in Michigan. They must have her down in Michigan, which is wild. And I was like Rutrow, but also a story that I saw this one line in and it talked about how the Clinton staffers weren't hooking up with each other. And I really believe that there is a whole other metric that you can gauge which campaign is winning

based on fun. And hooking up is fun. I don't know who is having the Randy Goodtime on any campaigns right now, but it does appear to me that the Trump team is having more fun in these closing days than the Harris team. And that, you know, it doesn't tell you,

They don't know more than we know necessarily, but that fact is usually pretty predictive. So that's where I am right now. What prediction do you guys have? I predict that a lot of people are going to be unhappy when we know the results of the election. I think we sort of covered my thing earlier in the conversation with Stephen and then again earlier. I mean, it's entirely possible that this election is going to end up being as close as the polling has suggested it's going to be for the past several months. I think it's also possible because of the underlying volatility in our politics that we've seen since 2006 because of the massive realignment that's taking place that we are in the

middle of that we're witnessing, the distaste for the candidates, the gap and enthusiasm, there are all sorts of reasons that we could use post facto to explain why it ended up, being as close as we had anticipated or as the polling had suggested. And I think people should be open to that possibility. The other thing I'll say is, you know, in the lead up to 2020, we saw Donald Trump and his team not very subtly telegraphed that they were going to say the election, that he won no matter what he said. You had literally, you had Steve Bannon saying that in public before the vote, several days before the vote, that Donald Trump. plan was to go on television that night when he was likely to be leading because of election

day in person voting and declare victory and that he was going to use that to try to remain in office. And of course, thanks to the work of the January 6th committee and the mostly Republicans who testified before it, we now know exactly how elaborate that plan was and what they did between election day and January 6th to try to keep Donald Trump in office. I would say what we're seeing this year makes me even more concerned if Kamala Harris does, in fact, beat Donald Trump. Because Trump didn't sort of come up with this plan and try to implement it starting in July. This has been the core of his message for years. His argument has been, if I lose, they stole it.

And every part of his campaign has been built around that fact, even as get out the vote operation. call it too big to rig. Make it too big to rig. You're seeing them, I mean, Donald Trump is now, we're recording this Thursday morning, has been for the last several days, pretty regularly tweeting claims about voter fraud that are not true. You're seeing his people, people in Trump world, amplifying those claims, coming up with those claims, I think in some cases, inventing those claims. And you're also seeing people this happened at the Madison Square Garden rally that we talked about earlier, try to create a sense of inevitability about a Trump victory. And this is what Tucker Carlson said. He's obviously going to win. He's so obviously more popular than she is.

She's this failed politician, in effect, the only way that he could lose as if it's stolen. if she wins, I think we can expect that to be a match on dry kindling. And I really worry about what that means. Last word, you, Jonah. I'll give the more optimistic take on that and then make a better prediction. I agree it's going to be bad. If Harris wins, there'll be some violence. There'll be some ugliness.

But Trump's not president of the United States. And a big chunk of his ability to create a January 6th was because he was actually in the White House at the time. And the things that made the January 6th strategy, you know, the John Eastman garbage strategy, possible, have been largely fixed in law. So, like, if the results come in and Trump loses, they'll, I agree with you,

there's going to be all sorts of ugliness, or there is a high probability that there will be ugliness. But there is no victory strategy to it. right it is more tantrum than trying to steal an election there's just simply no way if the results are clear trump can actually overturn the results of the election i don't think he really could have on january 6th but because he was president there were means at his disposal where he could give it a shot right and he almost he almost got you know all these electors sent back and blah blah blah and who knows and he was going to press the chaos going further and that's what was so i just don't think he

can do that this time. And so then if he loses, you know, does Elon Musk say, holy crap, I got to get out of this position. And does he lose support from some people who really just don't need that kind of ugliness? Tucker is incentivized because he is trying to maintain credibility with this alienated mass audience for a long time after Trump. And being on their side about the stolen election stuff is in his business interest to be like sort of William Jennings Brian of jackasses and and so that's a different thing so yeah I think there can be violence but I don't think there's a chance that the election will be overturned and because there's no chance for that the more capable stakeholders in the Trump BS apparatus probably will jump ship

pretty early. Like, I don't think Lindsey Graham and all those people, you know, the reason why Lindsey Graham is a useful bellwether in these kinds of things is because he is such a craven coward. And he will go where his own longevity in politics needs him to be. And so the idea that he is going to like back a ship that cannot help but sink, you know, know, there are going to be a lot of those kind of people are just going to be like, hey, Trump give a shot he lost, and there'll be tantrums and there'll be people firebombing polling stations and terrible stuff, and that stuff should be put down with an iron fist within the confines of the rule of law. But I'm less worried about how bad it could be than you are.

In terms of my predictions, I think it's going to be an earlier night than people think one way or the other. I'm not saying that it's going to be all the polling error is in one direction or not, but I think even if the polling errors are, if some of the polls are wrong favorable to Trump and some of the polls are wrong favorable to Harris, if you average them, you still get an error and it's not going to be zero. It's going to be like one or two points one way or one or two points the other way. And that will be enough to be decisive in a whole bunch of places so that I think, I think by Wednesday morning, we're in pretty good shape for knowing who won. And with that, for dispatch members, we'll see you on election night. And everyone else will talk to you

when we may or may not know something, but the ballots will be cast. Happy voting. I'm going to be able to be.