The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - The Breakdown of the Republican Coalition (Trump's Fault?) || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: January 9, 2024

If you watched yesterday's video, then you already know that Donald Trump has no shot at winning the general election (assuming he's not DQ'd or in jail). Today, we're looking at WHY Trump can't get elected. Full Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/the-breakdown-of-the-republican-coalition

Hey, everybody, Peter Zine here coming to you from the winter wonderland that is snowy Colorado. Today, we're talking about why Donald Trump has no chance of winning the general election, assuming he's not disqualified, assuming he's not in jail. Okay. So you have to look at the way our electoral system works. We have a first-past-the-post single-member district system, which is a fancy way of saying that you vote for one person who is representing a very distinct geographic area. It's not like the Netherlands where you vote for a party. You're voting for one specific person.

And what that does is it encourages our parties to, for there to only be two of them, and for them to be very big tent parties, because they need to get that marginal vote more than whoever is running on the other side. It's all about numbers of votes. It's one of the reasons why whenever we do get a third or a fourth party, they never last for more than one or two political cycles. And then other parties fall out. We go back to the two.

I'm not saying that can't happen this time around, but we're getting really late in the day for it to affect this election. Maybe the next one. Anyway, first pass the post. So if you're going to have a big tent party, that means you're going to have a lot of power centers, a lot of factions within each party. And those factions are going to rise and fall in political power as technology and geopolitics and social issues evolve. And we've certainly seen that in the last 30 years. We've had hyper-globalization. We now have de-globalization. We've had the rise of the information economy and now social media. We've had the baby boomers being in the prime to the baby boomers now retiring in mass. We are going through one of these transitions. So it's really important to understand where all the factions are, especially as related to each other, even in their own political party. So, for example, Republicans versus Democrats. The Republicans have always had a numerical disadvantage because they just don't have as many voters. They don't have as many. factions. You've got the pro-lifers, the military voters, the law and order voters, business voters,

for example. And the reason that this faction, despite having fewer numbers than the Democrats, has always done relatively well, is because their issues in play typically don't clash. The pro-lifers really don't care about business regulation. The business community really doesn't care about military policy and so on. So you have a smaller coalition, but a very solid coalition, a very reliable coalition, and everybody shows up to vote every time. And so even though they don't have as many members, you know what you're going to get in each electoral cycle. And if you can pull a few independents, you're good to go. The Democrats have a different sort of system. They've thrown a very, very wide net indeed. And I'm oversimplifying here a little bit, but they basically

have a three-part coalition, minorities, coastal, highly educated elites, and organized labor. And The problem with that coalition is when you start running on the issues and talking about the specifics of policy during a campaign, it's very difficult to have anything that all three of those factions agree upon. So, for example, those coastal educated elites, in order to get rid of racism, they started coming up with new terms to call people, which, you know, we usually call racist, but whatever. Anyway, Latinx is my personal favorite. Has no root in any Latin culture, and something like 97% of Hispanics find it either pointless

or a little offensive, but they tried to push it anyway. And so you've got to split on social issues among those two groups. Another great example is the Green Revolution, which obviously the coastal educated folks are really big on. But the unions are not so much because most of those jobs are not going to be unionized. So whenever you get a candidate who is a little brainy and who runs on the issues, someone like Michael Dukakis or Hillary Clinton, you know, tries to make practical pledges during a campaign, you're going to start an internecine fight,

and they're going to have entire chunks of the Democratic electorate that just don't show up at all. And it's very hard to win that way. What they need to win is a charismatic candidate who doesn't really talk about anything real at all, and that's why Barack Obama did so well. So this is the diad that we have been facing for the last 30, 40, 50, 60, 70 years. Now, under normal circumstances,

The Republicans have an advantage here because there are very few issues that are wedge issues within their own coalition. But what Donald Trump has done is shaken up the race and introduced a number of wedge issues, not just across society, but across the Republican electorate. And we now have any number of candidates who are, I don't know if saying that they're in Trump's pocket is the, how about in Trump's corner, there we go, that really break up the decision making process. for voters. So my personal favorite or guy I love to hate the most was Tommy Tuberville, who for months this year prevented military promotions in order to get his way on abortion policy. Those are two factions, military voters and abortion voters, who never had anything to fight about before and all of a sudden they're at each other's necks. He's Donald Trump has driven the business community out of the coalition because he basically doesn't like it when people tell him

no or when they say yes but Mr. President. He wanted the adoration and that was it. And so you have the business community that is now completely alienated from the social conservative voters. And in this sort of environment, the Republicans are facing a Democratic-style cohesion test. The problem here is that the Republicans don't have as many voters as the Democrats. And even if they pass the cohesion test, then they have to deal with all the other things that Donald Trump brings to the table. So they're not going to have their entire. coalition showing up if Donald Trump becomes the candidate. And that means just on the numbers, there's no way that Donald Trump can win.

And that's before you consider the independence. We're going to do that in a different video.