The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Stop Obsessing Over the Polls and Take a Hike Instead || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: July 19, 2024

Everyone wants to know if the assassination attempt on Donald Trump is going to impact the outcome of the election. I hate to break it to you, but no one knows. Full Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/stop-obsessing-over-the-polls-and-take-a-hike-instead

Hey, everybody, Peter Zine here coming to you from Colorado. We have had a lot of you right in asking about how the attempted assassination of Donald Trump affects my forecast for the 2024 presidential elections. And the answer is very simple. I have no idea. I can only think of once an American history where we have had somebody who was clearly going to get the nomination be the target of an assassination attempt. So N equals one. That one person is Teddy Roosevelt. and before those of you who are pro-Trumpers say,

yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, compare Trump to Roosevelt. It didn't end well for Roosevelt. I mean, number one, he finished his speech. And second, he went on to have one of the most catastrophic losses in American history to none other than Woodrow Wilson. So, you know, careful what you wish for. That is not my prediction that this is how it's going to go. What I'm saying is American experience with political violence at this level

is very, very limited. And so knowing the impact it's going to have on the election, it's not that it's a non-factor. It's something that we just don't. know how to predict. So at the moment, it's kind of in the wind. What I can tell you is that you should absolutely not be paying any attention to the polls, especially now. There are three things in play. Number one, most polls basically interview 1,000 or 2,000 people. They have a margin of error. They say, do you want to vote for candidate A or candidate B? And then they give you the results.

And that's a horrible way to do the polling in the United States for three reasons. Number one, Independence. People who are only 10% of the electorate, but who have decided most of the elections in the last 50 years, don't pay any attention to the polls and don't even answer them until after the political conventions are completed. Now, just this week, we have completed the Republican National Convention, but the Democratic one is not until, I believe, the 19th of August. So you shouldn't be looking at any polls for any reason until you get to the first week of September. second, the way Americans do polling is very different from the way Americans vote for their candidates. It's not like everybody goes into a single pool and whoever gets the most votes wins. No, no, no, no. You do it by state with the electoral college. Each state has a certain number of electors.

And the way it works by a combination of law and tradition is if a state registers that one candidate got one more vote than whoever came in second place, that candidate gets all. of the electors. So, for example, my home state of Iowa has seven electoral votes, I believe. It's been a while since I've been there. And so if you have 14 candidates running for president, and one of them gets 20 percent, and that's more than everybody else, they get all seven of those electoral votes. So until you get to a situation where you're looking at state polling as opposed to national polling, and you can look at it on a map, the polls are pointless. Third, third-party candidates. Right now, they're really not included. in the polling. And if you go back to say the 2000 race between Gore and W. Bush, all the polls

indicated that Al Gore was going to walk away with it because they ignored that Ralph Nader was on the ticket in a lot of states. And while Nader wasn't a popular candidate, had no chance of winning, and really only got a few single digits of the national vote, that was concentrated in enough states that it drew away support from Al Gore and then gave the election to George W. Bush by a relatively narrow margin. Well, we have a third-party candidate running this time by the name of RFK Jr., who is absolutely a bat-shit crazy conspiracy theorist. Well, Donald Trump thought he had that part of the electorate quartered already, and now having an RFK in the mix means that even in places where Donald Trump was expected to get a rarely strong win, all of a sudden, there

might be enough support bled off for RFK Jr. that Biden will get the state. Anyway, none of this can be registered until such time as the polling changes. That won't be until September. So let me give you a little hint as to what I look for. There is a website that does all the aggregation for you and only includes the polls that are of high quality. It's called 270 to win. That's 270.com. It does it by state and the best part of this website is if you don't think, because you feel you know better for whatever reason. Maybe you live there. Maybe this is your job.

You can go through and click through and change the alignment of each individual state to see how it shakes out. Now, this screenshot that you're seeing right now, this is how it is on the 18th of July. This isn't the last day I'm here. I head backpacking tomorrow. So you guys can all scream into the void if you don't like what I have to say. Right now, the polls have registered the impact. of Biden's atrocious debate performance a few weeks ago. And as you can see, it's still kind of a hung race.

And we have not yet seen the impact of the appointment of J.D. Vance as Donald Trump's running mate. But again, not as polls matter yet. Wait until September. Look at this at September. Look at this, especially after the Democratic Convention concludes in late August. I would have normally done this video then, but I'm not going to be back by then. This is to give you guys something to chew on while I am doing anything but following American politics. Ciao.