The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - The Americans Didn't Vote With Their Wallets || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: December 23, 2024

Well, it looks like American politics got drunk at the holiday party and forgot who it was. Exit polls from the latest election show a significant shift in voting patterns.Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihanFull Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/the-americans-didnt-vote-with-their-wallets

Hey, everybody, Peter Zion, coming to you from New Zealand, and now that I'm safely in another country, I've got something about U.S. politics I thought I should share. We now have pretty good exit polling from all 50 states, and I can safely say that we've had a significant change not just in voting patterns, but in organizational patterns for the U.S. politically. Traditionally, when we think about the last 70 years of our bipartisan system, the wealthier you are, the more likely you are to vote Republican. It's the party of business and wealth. And if you're working class or poorer on the dole, you're more likely to vote Democrat, which is the party of the working man and the minorities. Yeah, that fell apart completely in this election. And this election, regardless of what

your income was, up to, once you get into the 1%, they don't track you anymore. So it basically half a million dollars or less had no bearing whatsoever. Every individual income category was within an point spread right clustered around 50% for who voted for who. So for the first time in American history and only one of a very rare number of times in global history, economics and income don't shape your political leanings. Now, this isn't sustainable. It's fun for an election and maybe two. And it means a couple things. Number ones, it means that the culture war is a big determining factor in how people vote. But more importantly, the idea that business and unions and rich and poor don't shape our politics is, of course, assonine. So how people

redefine how their income matters to them politically is probably to determine how we get out of this political mess that we're in right now. Because right now we've got two very small, very brittle parties, the Democratic Party and the Republican Party that are clustered around a very short list of issues that most of the country honestly doesn't care about all that much. and we've been presented with a series of voting for the lesser of two evils. Now, for me as an independent, I'm comfortable with that. I've been doing that a long time, but for everybody else, it's a shit show. So we're going to see this shift over the next election cycle or two,

and money will come back into it for better or for worse. Income will come back to it. Identity will come back to it from an economic point of view. And then we get a fundamentally new party system. What will that look like? I have no idea. Literally, this has never happened before in American history. So we have no examples whatsoever to judge by.

But I can guarantee you that we're all going to find out together, and it's going to be really uncomfortable.