The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Election Postmortem... || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: November 19, 2024

Well, that didn't go the way I expected. Here's what happened...Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihan Link to graphics: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/election-postmortem

Hey, everybody, Peter Zine here coming to you from a hotel room. I forgot my microphone today. I was planning on doing this from the beach, but there's a hurricane out there anyway, so it wouldn't have worked. So anyway, the federal elections did not go the way I was anticipating, so I thought it was worth doing a post-mortem. So I'm going to remind you how I got to my conclusion, and then we can pick apart what changed. So in the last, the last 30 years, most elections, especially at the presidential level, have been decided by a group of Americans who self-identify as independence. It's a much smaller set than the people who self-identify, though. Roughly 30% of the American population self-identifies as Democrats, roughly 30% as Republicans, and the 40% of the middle call themselves independence, but over three quarters of that group will vote for one party or the other almost all the time, over 90% of the time.

So it's really only a thin little sliver of 5 to 10% that has been the balance of power within the American political system for decades. they put in Obama twice, they put in W twice, they put in Biden, they put in Trump, they kicked Trump out. And so when I looked at what was happening with the American political system, I was like, okay, this is the nut. This is what matters. Watch that group. Focus your predictions on that group. And when we got to the 2022 midterms, Donald Trump had spent the last two years telling independence that their votes didn't matter and that everything should be decided at the primary level rather than the general election level. And the collective response of America's true independence was,

hold my beer. And in all but one of the races that Donald Trump put his finger on, the Democrats won. And so what was supposed to be a red wave in the midterms turned into, at best, a red fizzle. My thinking was, independents are fickle. They tend to switch sides every two or three elections. They get buyers remorse. and it took Donald Trump really pissing them off to their core to show up twice and vote the same way twice in a row. And since he didn't change his rhetoric, my anticipation was that the independents would do what they had done in 2020 and 2022, again in 2024.

So look at these two maps. This first one shows what happens if the independents split 50-50. And you can see how well it is an advantage to the Democrats. there's plenty of possible ways that the Republicans can pull it out of the fire. But if you get something like happened in 2022, when the independents break very, very strongly, the second map, you have a very different map that is very, very difficult for the Republicans to have any chance of success. And some version of the second map is what I anticipated happening in 2024.

Now, we are not going to have final good exit polling slash political identification polling data until the Pew Research Group finishes with their assessment. They started the day the election ended. And I doubt we're going to get the full results of that study until we get to probably the end of the first quarter of 2025. But we do have expert poll data. And now we do have the final results from pretty much all of the states, Arizona and Nevada just reported.

And so we do have some pretty good data to work with. And at the onset, it appears that my prediction for the independence basically, proved true. Three elections in a row, they broke very strongly against Trump. The problem was that everyone else voted differently. It's like we've been in this lockstep for especially the last 12 years where you've got a hardcore group that's Maga lead and a hardcore group that's more elite led. And there hasn't been a lot of movement in those groups, but what we saw in this federal election is a lot of bleed over as the elite led group just lost support over to Trump. So, give you an idea of how extreme it was. The Democratic Alliance, as we understand it today,

it's basically a pillar of, there are three pillars support it. You've got coastal, primarily white, primarily college educated elites. You've got minorities of all flavors. And then you have organized labor. But what happened this time is a lot of those pillars broke. Women, especially unmarried women are a big part of that alliance, but they switch to Trump for five points. 18 to 29 year olds, the youth, which almost always went for the Democrats, broke towards Trump by 6%. Black men went to Trump by 7% more than before. Non-white college graduates shifted by 9%. Asians by 11% people who are in the lower income bracket, 30 to 49% people who you like to think of as a wealth or queen, whatever, broke 12% for Trump. But Latinos, wow. Latinos shifted by

17% with Latino men going 22%. And so we saw a lot of these groups that we've always associated with being fairly tightly linked to the Democratic group. Break. And that changes a lot. And for those of you who are on the left and you're like going through a lot of kicking yourself and a lot of soul surgery, I've seen a lot of hot takes in the last week. Just keep in mind that the voters are always right, especially when they don't show up. up. And so we've got three things going on here now that we need to keep an eye on. Number one, we are in a period of political realignment and party loyalties are obviously shifting. It's very

much in play. How much in play, unfortunately, is still unclear. The biggest difference we had, aside from the demographic breakdowns, between 2020 and 2024, is that voter participation dropped by over 10%. Trump just doesn't have the pull for or against. He doesn't have the motivating factor that he once did, and that makes drawing any conclusion a little fuzzy. But I'm pretty sure about number two and number three. So number two, with political factions in motion, a new party is being born. Now, I can't tell you right now if the current alignment that brought Trump to power for his second term is a permanent feature of MAGA, and it is MAGA. This is not the Republican alliance. It's something new. But what I can say, it is the end of what

we think of as the Democratic Party. Remember, minorities, organized labor, educated white coastal elites. Well, organized labor is now at best from the Democratic point of view, a swing vote. And over half of them did vote for Trump. But minorities is really where it's at. The fastest growing demographic in the country, largely due to immigration, is Hispanics. And Hispanics, people always seem to forget this. Hispanics are the group in the United States that are most opposed to migration in really any. reform. And so when Donald Trump made a lot of his pitch about the southern border, it really resonated with the people who at one point crossed. And losing those two legs, Hispanics and

organized labor out of the Democratic alliance, means that any places where those two pieces matter for local politics all of a sudden are at best up for grabs. And that means without some significant soul searching and more importantly, some significant alignment shifts, white, coastal educated elites, that's not a party. That's a book club and it can't win federal elections. Third, we're going to have a constitutional crisis in the next couple of years. If you can put your personal political preferences and passions to the side for a moment and go back and look at pretty much any interview or any rally speech that Donald Trump gave in the last three months, I think if you're honest with yourself, you will see that the guy is failing. And even if you can't be honest

with yourself, you have to admit that he is older now than Joe Biden was when Joe Biden became president for years ago. And the chance of Donald Trump serving an entire term without losing his mind is vanishingly small. And unlike Joe Biden, who has a group of peers and friends and confidants who can tell him the truth and maybe nudge him to make a decision. For example, leaving. Donald Trump has no one like that. Donald Trump's Maga Party is a cult of personality. He has purged it completely of anyone who might be able to challenge him. And he's made it very clear in what we know so far about his new cabinet that there are going to be no members of his old cabinet who ever told him no or yes but. And that includes people like

Mike Pompeo and Nicola Haley. So how do you give you? rid of a president who has lost his mind that doesn't go. Do you have to wait for him to die? Well, this is a constitutional crisis for the country, because we've never been in this situation before. And it's a leadership crisis for MAGA because Trump is MAGA. So how we shake out of these general trends, a little degree of voter apathy, the demise of the Democratic coalition with no clear replacement and the coming demise of Donald Trump with no clear replacement. It's going to be a lively time. I am sure I'm going to have a lot to say in the next four years.

So stay tuned.