Weekly Skews - Weekly Skews 11/08/22 – VOTE OR DIE (OR BOTH)

Episode Date: November 9, 2022

It's all midterm talk tonight as we welcome Dr. Gary Segura, director of Latino polling for the DNC in 2020 and the Dean of UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. Join us!Support the show

Hey everybody. Welcome back. Happy Scus Day to you. It's Election Day. I don't know why I said that in such a happy fashion. But yeah, here it is. November 8th, 2022. I'm Trowder. That's Mark Aegee. What's up, Mark? How you feeling? You know, no, I was just, I was going to do a bit up top. It's actually what you want to talk about. You know, Wakanda forever comes up this weekend. Maybe we just rambled up. that for it. But yeah, it's election day. It's a day America gets its report card and it feels like the teacher is like a mean, vindictive asshole who hates us. So there you go. It's a rainy cold day in Los Angeles. We got a flash flood warning in a city where it never rained. So I'm glad you brought that up. I didn't want to because, you know, we're live as always. And yeah, me and Mark actually have inclement weather going on, which is very rare for L.A. But yeah, If some shit goes down, who knows, hopefully it won't.

But, yeah, we got rain out. Rain out here is sort of like snow in the south, I feel like. It's like people just, people don't know how to deal with it. Heavy amounts of rain. I hope you got a bunch of eggs and bread and shit because we're lost. We're lost. Yeah, fire up the wood stove, put some cornbread on it. Yeah, it is a little bit bizarre.

Yeah, let's talk about what we're not going to know tonight is pretty much anything. because, you know, it takes a while to count votes because, you know, there's going to be, like, just to prepare everybody, there's going to be a red mirage in Pennsylvania and a blue mirage in Arizona because of the order they count mail-in ballots. Pennsylvania is a law. They can't start counting mail-in ballots until election day, so they're going to be a few days behind. In Arizona, they can drop them all in in the morning. So, yeah, because of how we all vote. But, yeah, there's a little bit of chaos going on today. There hasn't good news.

There hasn't been any sarcastic terror. terrorism that I heard about. No polling place gotten shut up. Of course, we haven't started doing the extended two-day vote counts yet, which is one shit. It really gets hairy. Well, at least there's that. Yeah. Some voting machines went down in Maricopa County, Arizona, which calls some right-wing conspiracy theorizing going on. But just to set everyone straight, Maricopa County's run by Republicans, including the elections. They think their election board is four to one Republican. So everyone can chill the fuck out. But while we're on Arizona, there's so far there have been 18 cases of voter intimidation, alleged case of

voter intimidation across the state, according to the Secretary of State. There was a cyber attack in Illinois, I took a county offline for a while today. A guy with a knife and don't know his motive shut down a polling place in Wisconsin for a couple hours. Voting hours have been extended places like Pennsylvania, North Carolina

because of technical logistics issues like Pennsylvania a polling station literally ran out of ballots. Voting hours been extended in Harris County, Texas, and in Arizona, the Republicans went to court to get election hours extended because of those voting machines, which that's funny because that's usually the opposite side they're on. Yeah, I know there's some bullshit going on.

I saw a guy on Reddit posted thing. He went to the front page. He's from Pennsylvania, and he said he sent in a mail-in ballot, and then he got a letter or a notification or something that told him that his ballot was rejected for some kind of technicality reason, and to go to this polling place to rectify it. And he showed up at the polling place and he posted a picture of the polling place. And there was like a line out the door and around the block. And he said that like cops had been removing people from the line and shit like that.

So, you know, it all seems to be on the up and up so far. There was a crazy story out of Oklahoma. A sheriff in Tulsa said he was going to arrest them poll workers because they were refusing to give ballots to Republicans. Now, I don't know if this sheriff's a winged or not. But when it did the photo, it was like two dozen people got the night. ballots and their partisan breakdown was more Republican than Democrat. I didn't we're talking about Oklahoma, but there were Democrats turned away, too. One of the poll workers he said he was going to rest was a Republican.

I don't know, man. People are going insane. Yeah, so also before we get to the show, in the lead up, Trump did a bunch of truly insane rallies. And he spent all day to day posting on truth social trying to get poll workers killed about how everything's rigged against him specifically. Um, he also, uh, threatened to, um, he announced some new policy to pursue once he's reelected to give drug dealers a death penalty after a two hour trial, then mail the bullet to their families as some sort of message, uh, uh, what?

Yeah, Jesus Christ. That's some godfather shit right there. Just playing by mob rules, which I guess, you know, that kind of cracks. He also proposed his solution for journalism. dealing with anonymous sources is to imprison them and have them raped until they give up their sources. I'm not sure if no one covering Trump anymore

is good. Like, people need to know how insane this shit is. But anyway, he did debut a new nickname for Ron DeSantis. He called him Ron DeSanctimonious. And he threatened

he has some blackmailed information on DeSantis, which DeSantis seems like a garden variety goon and not a pervert, but I don't know, maybe. There was a profile that dropped this week of DeSantis' year spent teaching school between finishing college and starting law school where he taught at a private school in Georgia, like a super rich private school in Georgia, where he apparently would party with

the teenagers when he was 23. Sure. So maybe he was a pervert. Yeah. And while we're talking, today is when we're talking about democracy and this truly wild story. So the North Carolina governor's race, if you believe the public polling is close. Right. The Republican candidates run this harsh law and order campaign about rising crime rates in New York. We talked about in a crime episode recently. There's no, there's no connection to reality between people's panic over crime and actual crime realities.

But his campaign has largely been bank full, a bankroll by Ronald Louder, who's this heir to the S.A. Loudor, makeup fortune. And when asked, Latter will give the law and order spiel, but he also has a deeply personal motive. It turns out that Kathy Hatchell, in a Democratic governor who succeeded Andrew Cuomo, he met with her to complain about a, was it, say, a wind power line put up near his house in the Hamptons, and the project didn't get canceled. So he's basically spent $11 million dollars. You're right. Because he's mad about it. Right. The whole thing is because, like, he don't like the look of that.

that windmill from his back porch or whatever. Yes. Somebody put a windmill up in the distance so he could see from his back porch in the Hamptons from his compound. And thus he has dedicated millions of dollars into burying that person and changing the political landscape of the entire state and region. Yeah. Just billionaire stuff.

You know. Yeah. Democracy, good in theory, but under a current campaign finance rules, uh, just fucking clown. his granddaddy made some makeup so he gets to overthrow the state government and one last little follow along that thing LA is millionaires have come out we haven't we don't talk too much about LA politics because it's not super relevant to most of the viewers but Rick Caruso

running for a Trump supporter who's run for mayor as a Democrat because that's what happens it's not really one party rule it's at both conservatives everybody just runs with a D next their name right right so Caruso has given a much money to Mr. Conno yada I got out of. Anyway, Katie Perry, Chris Pratt, all these celebrities who are pissed off about having to see homeless people from the limo windows or campaigning all right for Rick Caruso. So anyway, I hope rich people, you have millions of dollars, but you still get one vote. Just use your one vote and fucking chill out. But, by the way, have you seen any, like I was, I don't really see many campaign ads

because the only live TV I watch is sports. but man I've been bombarded with Rick Caruso ads which if I didn't know any better I'd vote for him I know no honestly I'm glad I'm glad you said that because you in this show us talking about him and everything is the only reason that I know that other stuff about him I mean it's really it really highlights how effective messaging and marketing and propaganda and all that shit is

because yeah I've seen a lot of Rick Caruso ads too and I'm like yeah he seems all right I like, I like what this guy's laying down. I'm all for this. You know, I wouldn't know any better. Otherwise, if that's all I was going on, which that is all a lot of people are going on, is the ads that they see. It's the most cynical horseshit, if you guys don't know it, he's a billionaire, self-financing his campaign. And he's running ads like California is a ballot initiative to basically protect abortion rights in the state constitution.

And he's running ads saying, even if you don't vote for me, vote for this to protect the rights of California. formulas. Meanwhile, he's a pro-life dude who's giving millions and millions of dollars to pro-life causes. You could say, well, he's just a businessman buying influence because he wants to protect his tax bracket. But it's like, he's just fucking lying. It's just absolutely fucking lie. And I find it infuriating. And one last thing for you got to get the show. We watched a bunch of woke people in New York, uh, boo Ted Cruz at a Yankee's game a couple weeks ago. So I thought you would, we would also enjoy watching Ted Cruz getting booed by a bunch the Texans at the Houston Astros World Series championship array.

Dude, we've said it before about Ted Cruz, but like, who like, he keeps getting reelected, it seems like everyone hates him. These are fucking Texas sports fans. You know what I mean? Like, I don't think people think of sports fans as being the wokenest bunch. In fact, it's the opposite. These are, like, people that care enough about sports to go to a World Series parade, and they are resoundly booing and rejecting this guy.

But he just, you know, continues to escape by. Like, it's wild. It's got to be balanced because we're talking about sports fans, like baseball fans, I would assume, would tend to be the most conservative. Right. Next to, like, college football. Right. But it's in Houston, which is a deep.

Blue City, so I think it would even out to be like, you know, a non-partisan crowd. But some guy in that crowd got arrested because he hit, he almost hit, he threw a beer Ted Cruz and almost hit him in the head with it so he got arrested for itself. So yeah, people don't like this, fucker. All right. Well, let's get into it. With us as always his producer, Matt. This is Weekly Skews.

I want to remind you, of course, two quick things. Number one, if you'd like to see me perform live, please go to traycrouter.com. Check out all the dates we got coming up in the coming months. It's going to be very exciting, going all over the place. we're still adding more all the time. So go to Trey Crowder.com. Check it out, come and see me. Number two, if you enjoy this program

and we'll like to show your support, you can do so by signing up on Patreon, $5 a month, get you access to full-length bonus episodes. We're going to record one later this week where we break down some of the fallout from these midterm elections. You don't want to miss that. So go to weekly skews.com slash more,

or you can just go on Patreon and look me up. Either way works, sign up on there, get some more skews in your life. Now, as for the show tonight, it's, of course, all midterm talk as we welcome to the show, Dr. Gary Seguer, who was the director of Latino polling for the DNC in 2020, and is the dean of the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. We're looking forward to that conversation, but first, of course, we must again, must begin with the Daily Dumbass. Matt, graphic, please. Tonight's D.D. Don Jr. for thinking. and he won't have to actually get a job one day.

Yes, watch this clip. You pass away. You can, if you like your child, I always say, if you don't like, leave it to charity. Some of us have horrible children. Do you have any horrible children? Does anybody have like a child where you really are not going to leave your farm? Any farm? No, you don't have to.

Just if you don't like them, don't, you know, then what I did if you doesn't mean anything. But I got rid of the inheritance. You know what would happen. It's so funny. I love it so much. Literally talking about how much they suck and how much he doesn't love them. You know what I mean? Where every waking moment is spent publicly seeking his approval.

And he goes to a rally and he was like, look, I know what it's like to have a piece of shit as your kid or multiple pieces of shit. You know what I mean? Just totally worthless. Can't rely on for anything. Don't deserve shit. I hear you, Iowa. Yeah, it's hilarious. Yeah.

Yeah, it sounds like using the crowd like a therapist. Like, yeah. I don't know who the man talks to. Like, uh, might have put this is an old anecdote before while this guy's robography of Trump and I heard an interview with him where they're like trying to figure out, they get to the core of the man and like there wasn't anyone there. Like they asked him who his closest friend was and he didn't understand the questions. Like you mean a friend?

Like someone I call when I have a problem and they go like, yeah. And he goes, no, I don't, I don't have anything. I mean, the one thing I mean, the one thing I'll say. about Donald Trump is I do sort of feel like what you see is what you get with him. Do you know what I mean? Like I don't, like you said,

try to get to put aside the public persona and find the man. I would not ever assume that that man existed outside of what we all expect him to be. I feel like he's pretty straight down the fairway exactly what you would expect him to be at all points in time. Yeah.

I mean, one of the, I feel like I laughfully hard one time trying to imagine Donald Trump like reading a poem and thinking about it. It's just like, there's like nothing going on behind, like, these same guys, they asked him, like, they just follow a question or talking like, what do you think about when you look in the mirror and he didn't understand a question? And they asked him, who would be your ideal dinner companion?

And he said, I'm paraphrasing as like, a beautiful babe with big tits. Like, it's like, living or dead? Who would you like to eat with? Einstein, Lincoln, you know? Nietzsche. Could I choose myself three times, like just three other versions of me? That's the only dinner I'd like to have. Yeah.

Yeah, all right. Well, our first honorable mention for Daily Dumbass is Tim Ryan for turning all the Mexicans, trans, apparently. I don't know. Here, watch this. And Tim Ryan is sort of the poster board for oligarchy. If you look at his views on green energy, really good for the people who fund his campaign, really bad for the people of Youngstown, Ohio. If you look at his views on, for example,

flooding America with illegal aliens and then using American tax dollars to fund gender reassignment surgeries for those aliens, that's exactly what Tim Ryan has proposed doing. It's the closing message for a U.S. Senator. It's like, like, when people look at that, who thinks that's true? I don't know, man.

I mean, apparently a goodly number of people think that's true. Like, I'm totally with you, but it seems like there's a fair amount of people who see things like that and just nod their head stoically throughout. They're like, that's exactly right. That's exactly what he is trying to do. And we must stop him at all costs. I think that's absurd. But I also think that that happens. I just like, it's such an alternate reality, like that the government provides health care for people in this.

Like, you and I have both been pretty poor in our lives. There's no safety, man. It doesn't exist. I just don't, I don't know what the fuck is, guys, these people from another planet. And I, like, this works. I don't like, it's just Christ. No, it's just, it's like, you know, it's like the next, it's like soap opera storytelling or something where it's like, we got to go bigger. We have to.

Like, we've already done everything. So we got to go bigger. It's like, oh, you're sending Mexicans over the border. That's not bad enough. Guess what? You're not going to believe this. He's turning those Mexicans into, you know, lady Mexicans or whatever. He's chopping all their dicks off.

because they won't it because that's how they are. And that's what's going to happen in Tim Ryan's America. And, uh, but yeah, it plays, I guess. I guess. I don't know. I guess. Yeah. You want to do one more from get the doctor up here?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Our next honorable mention is this guy's wife for playing the long game to get him out of the house. Play it, Matt. This guy killed me. about the inflation and how gas is up by you know god knows what state you're in you're paying a lot of money how has that affected you you know it's really affected my wife more than anything she's keeping the regular job and i'm so gas and everything goes up and my traveling on the state is is around the country is funded by five 10 dollar tips from people and you know the money i make on roofs

and things but so really it hasn't affected me too much about this guy's traveling around the country you're going from Trump riot to Trump Rout. His weird Uncle Sam outfit. And his wife's paying, but his wife got a second job to make sure he can stay as far fuck away from her as possible. Yeah, bless her heart, man.

But, you know, I mean, look, it's got to be something of a full-time job to commit to being the crazy Uncle Sam guy at all these rallies. You know what I mean? Like, what extra time is he going to have? You know, like he's got to travel. He's got to be out there.

He's got to make appearances. I mean, you know, he needs a support system. And luckily, he has one. I'm sure he'd never asked for a handout in his life, though. There was a guy at my gym, the other thing, I think I sent you guys, I told you guys about him and a text to me, but he was squatting 700 pounds in an ultra-Maga shirt, T-shirt while wearing a blindfold.

And I was like, what the fuck is? I don't even know what the blindfold's for. And he also was wearing American Flag Converse and American Flag Water Bottles. It's like, how many different, like, the American flight is cool. It looks cool. Hold on, though. Hold on, because this is important to me.

You're, um, you said he was squatting. The picture you sent was him on a leg press. You saw him successfully. Okay. But, but he did it, though. Yeah. Yeah. He wasn't even a big dude.

He was just like, big. If you guys want to rent this, man, you got to get to training. Because these dudes are fucking. All that, all that freedom cautioned through is. Baines, man. He's an eagle in human form. That's what I bet eagles can squat like a motherfucker, you know? So, yeah, doesn't surprise me, I guess. But yeah, that's, you know, and I'm surprised he didn't have more than two American flag, you know, forms of accoutrement as he's in the gym there. But with that said, the man himself is here. So we're going to go

ahead and get to him. Our guest tonight, as I mentioned earlier, was the director of Latino polling for the DNC in 2020. And is the dean. of the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. He has been featured on News Hour Frontline, the CBS Evening News, MSNBC, numerous other outlets, and is a veritable expert in American polling. Everybody, please welcome Dr. Gary Seguera. Hey, Doc, how you doing?

I'm doing great. How you doing? We're doing good. Thank you for joining us. So I guess our first, you know, the softball question, and the easiest one we'll throw at you here tonight is, won't you predict the future for us? How should we all be feeling right now?

Not to put any pressure on you, but what's your expectations? We should be feeling warm because the earth is warming and there doesn't seem to be anyone who wants to do anything about it. That's true. Hopeful note.

You know, there are nights like this that are hard to, so it's obviously not going to be a great night for Democrats, but I think we knew that going in. Historically, it wouldn't be. President's party loses seats in the midterm election pretty consistently. That's true of both parties. I think the question is, will it be a really, really bad Democratic night, or will it have some positive surprises?

I think there'll be a few positive surprises. I don't think this is a washout kind of night. And then you live to fight another day in 2024. Politics is about the long game, right? do you think that like because like you said the general rule of thumb is that the pendulum swings back the other way against the ruling party in the midterms and coming into the beginning of this year looking forward to the midterms like back in January everybody was like yeah the Democrats are going to get waxed that's what we all know and then over the summer like with row and all these other sort of initiatives and everything it seemed like the discourse was you know implying it could go in the other direction and now we're back where we're at, and it's like, if you said it's not going to be a total washout, if that actually happens, is that like a moral victory for them? Like, is it possibly better than what you might have expected based on what the trends are, or is it still just bad? Yeah, I mean, it's going to be

pretty bad in the sense that, you know, I think we're going to lose the House of Representatives and the Senate very, very close. I think everybody knows that. But I think, you know, we just did a bunch polling on this coming into the election, you know, just the last couple of days here. And the numbers are actually looking pretty good in the sense that the president was at 50-50 approval rating. The generic ballot was essentially even. That's not good enough for Democrats, but an even generic ballot is definitely something they're going to be happy with. And on every major issue that faces the political decision makers in the last couple of years in the next couple of years, Democrats hold majority positions among every racial and ethnic

group of the United States. So why is it that democratic positions do better than Democratic candidates? And the answer, there's two answers. And the biggest one this year is inflation. Like, the economy is just killing us. Right. Oil prices, gas prices, just killing us. And it's very hard to swim upstream against that. Right. Go ahead, Mark. Doctor, I want to ask you the generic ballot because I was thinking about that because like I mean like for frame of reference I forget the last number I saw but Democrats have to win by like five to seven points or something to win the House which is insanely undemocratic a lower case D Democratic but generic ballot like I'm curious like voters don't vote for generic politicians they vote for the actual

insane monsters that are on their ballots so like I just worry like why can't noise break through it like sure I might prefer a Republican in a neutral situation but the Republican I have to vote for is, you know, Margaret Taylor Green or Lauren Bulbert or, you know, whoever took Madison Coughlin's spot, you know, it's just like, it's, I don't know, people, where I grew up, people just say I vote for the man, not the party, and it's like, of course, that's sexist to begin with, but it's no longer true at all, is it? It doesn't seem that way. I don't, yeah, so first of all, a couple things. We are a much more homogenized set of political parties than we were when you and I were younger people, and I'm much older than

you, but it used to be that you'd have fairly broad coalitions in both the Democratic and Republican side, and now it's very, very pure. A lot of clear conservatives in one party, clear left-of-center voters in the other, and so you don't get as much diversity. But the second thing that's happened is that this mystery that I told you a moment ago, where Democratic positions run ahead of Democratic politicians, Republican positions run behind Republican politicians. So the question is why, and the only way to think about that is, is this sort of team notion, like, we're a Republican kind of people. What does that mean?

Could be rural, could be southern, very often as white. The other thing is that, you know, you made reference to the abortion decision or whatever. Our numbers tonight suggest that white women, Anglo-Saxon women, voted 55% Republican, just like they did two years ago, just like they did four years ago, just like they did in every election since 19. 1964. 1964 was the last national election where a majority of white women voted Democratic. So the Dobbs effect might have been real in terms of producing some intensity, but in the

end, it doesn't seem to have moved many white women voters, which is who the party targeted as a consequence of that decision. Right. So it's like, you know, all of the positions poll ahead of the candidates on this side and they pull behind the candidates on the other side. And I think, you know, what you're saying is like, in. In the abstract, these ideas for certain types of policies, people hear them, and they're like, yeah, that would be great. But when it comes time to actually vote an election, they just look at the letter beside the name or whatever.

It's like, I like that as an idea, but I don't like Democrats. So even though that's a Democrat idea, I'm not going to vote for a Democrat because there's like a disconnect between those things for your average voter. That's exactly right. People have an image in mind of who constitutes a Democratic supporter. and what a Democratic politician is for. And those images might be distorted, or they may cue on things that really matter to voters in a way that issues may not.

The obvious example for that would be race. We know that the party preferences are structured by race are tremendous. Republicans win a majority of votes and one and only one racial group in the United States, and that's been true for as long as I've been polling. So the idea that there are people who are voting on issues, that don't appear to be structured by their actual policy preferences, I think race is one.

The second historically was religion, but I think that has really faded, that really race is the most distorting factor in taking people who share a set of left-of-center policy positions and making them vote for team right. And team right, I think, in some instances, turns out to be team white. Yeah. I mean, there was a fascinating, I think in 2020, I'm doing, off the top of my head, but, like, Florida would be about an issue voted by a large majority to raise a minimum wage, but also voted for Trump? It's like, how can you have those same two preferences in your head at the same time? It's pretty, I guess you're right.

The race is the only thing I explain, race and racism, the one thing explains it. That's right. And by the way, just out of fairness, because I, you know, I don't feel the need to be fair, but I'm going to be fair just a little bit. We often look at working class people who vote Republicans. and think, what a mystery. Like, why are they doing this? It's bad for their economics. But we should also look at wealthy people, people with good incomes who vote Democratic. That should be an interesting question, too. And by the way, religion sometimes plays a role there.

People's belief in sort of Christian gospel, social gospel kind of arguments. Some may be civic, the idea that the society is better if we all do better, et cetera. So there's always reasons to find why people vote against what appear to be their economic interests. But yes, the The minimum wage vote is a classic example of that disconnect you're talking about. Yeah. Sorry, go ahead, Terry. No, no, you go ahead. I was going to, like Matt sent me a speech, a talk you gave from a while back.

And you had a take, I found really interesting, where you something you call the Freakonomicization of politics. Do you, can you tell our viewers what you meant by that because I thought it was really interesting? Well, so I'm a political scientist, and I apologize for that up front. That's what I did in life. And I think that political science is a discipline. Some of the political parties and the political operatives as an industry have become very focused on the clever to the exclusion of understanding what people are actually living. And so when Black Lives Matter happened, political scientists didn't have a sense of why that was coming. they hadn't really studied that. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, people didn't

expect that either. So there's this can't see the forest for the trees problem that a lot of analysts have, and I think it's true for political scientists, and it's true for political operatives in Washington. We like the clever, but the clever may not actually get us where we need to be. Yeah, we talk about that a lot of people being too clever by half. I think the way you typically put it as like a lot of people go to too much grad school or something which I know you would tell a lot of grad school I'm a dean of graduate school I can't possibly think I'm not trying to invest your money doc I'm not trying to make it well I guess sort of on a related note one thing I wonder about is it feels like when you look on the right

a lot of their messaging and the lead up to elections and stuff I mean it you know I'm a lefty it seems to me that every few years they sort of invent out of nowhere, some new boogeyman, you know, to add to the ranks of the culture war, whatever, like recently that critical race theory or things like that. And I'd just like to hear, you know, your outlook on sort of the effectiveness of that and, you know, how that sort of works. And is there, like, what's the opposition of that look? Like, what do you do in response to things like that? I'm not sure I know the answer, because if I knew the answer of how to respond to a bigger deal in Democrat House. I would say that this is this is the perfection of a very old art. There's a

story told of a Senate election in the 1950s in Florida where one candidate described the other as known to associate with known Fespians. Yeah. Okay, but right people would not so it was this creation of this sort of a little bit weird, a little bit funky, a little bit different. If you look at Critical Race Theory, which, by the way, almost no one on the right can actually define, let alone raise objections to. Before that, it was Antifa or Antifa. Remember Antifa? Has I ever seen an Antifa meeting? Like, do you know where they meet?

Because I keep trying to sign up, and there is no meeting. Because there is no Antifa. Like, these things are insane. So, yes, there's boogeyman after boogie man after boogie man. And I can go back to the 1988 election, and Michael DeCoccas wasn't dedicated enough to the Pledge of Allegiance, I think it well. Like, what? Like, these things are insane, and the Republicans are better at doing it. Now, the question is why, and I think there's two answers.

The first is that they have structured the party in opposition to solutions of anything because they want to shrink government. So they're the party of no. So when you get to, for example, the 2008 presidential election, the Democrats were talking about the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. It's very difficult to put permafrost and environmental damage on a bumper sticker. But drill baby drill, which is Sarah Palin's response, that's very easy to put on a bumper sticker. It's clever. It's fast. It's easy. And it tells people the solution to your problem is to just do more of what we're doing. And they buy that. So that's one reason I think why they're able to do that.

They're able to craft the message in a way. And then the second is that Democrats actually have a fairly complicated agenda of things that they're lying near to do. The Republican agenda, near as I can tell, is to hold the marginal tax rate down on the highest income owners in the United States. If you go back to Ronald Reagan's election through today, they might promise a million things, but what they really want to do is hold the marginal tax rate down. So they're a very simple agenda, and that's what they're doing.

any trick to get an electorate that does not share their policy preferences to cast a vote for them anyway. Right. So it's like, like you said, they're the party of no. Like on the Democrat side, it's like you have to explain to people. You have to express to people appropriately the changes you want to see made and why. But on their side, it's like we don't want anything to change. And here's why. Because same good, different, bad, essentially. And that's just kind of an inherently simpler undertaking, I guess. It's easier to approach that from that perspective than to do the odds. It's also the case that if you know people don't agree with you, go back to the example of the minimum wage, right? Republican operatives and Republican candidates, they know that their

position on the minimum wage is a minority position. It's not popular. They know their position on assault rifles and various gun control is a minority position. They know they're position on abortion is a minority position. They're a position on climate change. They're position on immigration. Like on every major issue, they hold a minority position. It doesn't serve them to talk about issues. Instead, they have to make up Antifa and Critical Race Theory as the boogeyman because they can't talk about the actual issues that Americans are concerned about. What the Democrats seem to have trouble doing, and again, if I had the answer, I'd tell you, is how to bring people back to focus on the things that they tell us they care about.

Right. Yeah, I mean, I know what you mean. People ask, you know, people ask me all the time because I'm like a liberal from the rural South. They'll be like, well, how do we talk to these people about these things? And like, you said, I'm always just like, I wish I knew. Like, you know, normally the stock answer I would try to give is I'd be like, well, you know, just don't go in their guns ablazing about abortion and stuff like that.

Talk about things I care about. Like, you know, put more money in their pocket and things like that. But it's, you know, in our conversation here is showing it, they are on board with those measures and those things as ideas in the macro sense. But it's not changing anything about how they identify in terms of like the two parties that they have as choices when they go to to vote. Like it's not, it's not pushing through in any way. It's not pushing through.

And there's also this weird cultural identity thing that I don't quite know how to describe. But I've heard you talk about it, actually, which is that there's this weird, and this is going to sound awful. So my apologies, but feminization of Democrats and masculinization of Republicans. Right. The idea of real men, but Republican. And it gets associated with all sorts of very strange behaviors. Like, you guys know that there's this thing called rolling coal. You guys know what rolling?

Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Of course. So why do real men pollute? more? I don't get the logical connection. Like, you know, if you have an extra tiny penis, you have to really blow some diesel smoke out of your, out of your, I don't get it. But that gets part and parcel of this notion that, ah, the crazy leftist Democrats want to take away our Ford F-150s and they want to take away our shotguns to go duck hunting and whatnot, because there's this masculinization

of conservatism, which is really divorced from the actual positions that conservatives hold. There was a, we were making, me and Treyer, making fun of this guy earlier today. It's a guy named Mick Adams, who's some sort of right-wing influencer. He's Australian, I don't know why, I don't know what he's doing in American politics, but he's been on this rant about hooters lately. And the other day, he was like, he was like, real men eat hooters with the boys. Beta leftists drink lattes with their wives. I'm like, you're going to have a wife now?

Yeah, it's Well, I'm gay at the goose, and I have no wife, so I promise me. Yeah, when you know, Tucker Carlson had that all, like, a little special about apparently, you know, to be a real man, you got to, like, put your balls in a tanning bed or something. Remember that? Like, you got to take UV rays to the testicles. Otherwise, you'll turn into a lefty cuck. And, I mean, it's just so hard to even track the logic or lack that. of of all of this stuff, you know, like it's just, it's overwhelming how ridiculous it all is.

And let's be honest. Ladies, gentlemen, do any of us want to live in a world where Tucker Carlson's Stees defines masculinity? I know. Tell me about it, man. Absolutely. Preach. It's like he is the bellwether for what a manly man is. All of a sudden, it's wild to me that they go with it. Like, if he looked like the rock or something, it'd be different. But, you know, even if he was still as full of shit as he is, but I'd at least sort of understand it, but him being what he is, and he's supposed to be the prototype for a manly man,

and everybody just rolls with that, it's wild. Meanwhile, Steve Austin was very pro-manage equality. Absolutely. Yeah, he's legit. Not to get like two good old days here, but like it's something divorced,

like we make fun of like them for like drawing Donald Trump as a jacked football player all the time. because, like, he sort of represents what they think of his masculinity. But, like, what I was taught was masculine was stuff like Duder, the duty, an honor, and, like, standing up for people and being honest, even when it hurts you. And it's like, those aren't, that's what I was taught masculinity was. It was just, like, so far removed. But, like, I can't even have my mind around what they think, like, being tough is anymore. It's just being mean, I guess.

Right. Right. You put your finger on it. It's meanness as opposed to toughness. And Tucker Carlson can be mean and Donald Trump can be mean. But one of the frustrating things, and I know you guys feel it too, is Democrats run, their candidates run behind their policy positions, but Republicans are running ahead of their policy positions in popularity. But good Lord, why?

I mean, there are a lot of truly, truly terrible people who hold office under the Republican banner or run for office under the Republican banner. Donald Trump is one of them. He is not a good person. No one thinks he's a good person. Even in the quiet spaces where Republicans would tell you the truth, they know he's not a good person. So why this guy? Like, really, this guy? Yeah, no, I mean, that was my number one question about in 2016.

I was blown away by like the fact that it was that dude specifically. Because I've said this plenty of times before, but I know for a fact, if before he became what he is now, like when he was just a, you know, reality TV laughing. Fingstock, like famous for being a rich douchebag, during that era, which was most of his life, if you had, like, asked any self-identified redneck man, you know, what they thought about Donald Trump, if they knew who he was, it would have been universally negative. They would have been like he's a, you know, he's like a carpet bagging Yankees, son of a bitch, born with a silver spoon up his ass, thinks he's better than everybody else and needs his ass kicked, like that type of thing.

Like, he represented everything they disliked, but then somehow came to be their champion, and I guess at least in part because they paid lip service to a lot of this shit that they wanted to hear that other people, you know, hadn't done before. But either way, it's still pretty wild to me. And the other thing is, you know, he despises them. Oh, yeah. Oh, he's so disgusted by them. Yeah, I did a video about that about like he hates y'all. Donald Trump hates poor white people and has nothing but disdain for them.

But I wanted to make sure and talk to you about, because, you know, know, you're a pollster at your thing. It's what you do. Me and Mark on a recent Patreon edition of this show talked about, there's this New York Times article that was all about the problems with polling. And it's, you know, even polling experts say that these midterm polls don't tell us anything. And it's like there's a lot of issues with polls lately. And I was just wondering, you know, how you feel about that and where you are on that.

Is polling broken? What is the problem? How should we feel about them? etc. There are multiple answers to that question. Polling is not broken, but polling has gotten a lot harder. Right. I'll start with that.

Over the course of your lifetime and mine, polling has changed from something that was done primarily on the telephone, where the rate of people actually answering and cooperating with you was about one and three, to something that's done almost exclusively online, because when was the last time you answered a telephone call from someone you? you didn't know, like no one had used the phone. So that's made it more difficult. But the second issue is that when we poll, there's two elements to that poll. One element is the questions we ask and how we ask them. And there are people who do it well and there are people who do it poorly. I happen to think we do it well, but some people don't and many people do it poorly. But then

the second question is, what is your theory of the composition of the electorate? If you go back to 2016, oh, the polls are wrong, the polls are wrong. Well, the polls were actually pretty close to the actual final popular vote number, but they were off by about 3% maybe and 2%. And if you look at how they were off, the representation of rural white voters in the ultimate electorate was a couple points higher than it was in the polling averages that the various mechanisms, various aggregators we're using to estimate what the electorate would look like on election day. We don't, we can only ask people at random, but we know that people don't vote at random. Many people don't vote, and there are people who do vote predictably, and we want to talk to the people who are actually

going to vote, but you have to have a theory of who's going to turn out. And if that theory is wrong, your poll will be wrong, even if you executed it perfectly. And then the third problem is that midterms are not one election. Midterms are 435 House elections and 33 Senate elections happening simultaneously. And they're virtually impossible to poll in a meaningful way unless you have an infinite amount of money. One question I wanted to ask that I think the most depressing thing about this election cycle has been the complete return to overt racism. I know that's like Republicans have been running on, you know, like the Southern strategy for a long time. But like The Willie Horton ad was considered shameful in 1988.

And they're like, I was seeing screen grabs today of like spam text messages. They were saying it was like Democrats want to defund the police and had like mugshots of black criminals. And then like Stephen Miller's organization has run some of the most overtly racist ads I've ever seen both national about immigration. They were running on baseball games. And in a league that's like, you know, significantly Latino. And there was a, the ad we, uh, it was running in Georgia today is about how we got to stop anti-white racism. And it's just like this stuff would have gotten you booted at a polite society a half a decade ago. Was there like a moment where they, where we went back to

1963 and I missed it. Like was it like a single moment? Is there some sort of trend? What was it? Donald Trump had the coming down the escalator in 2015. That's exactly. If I was going to point to a single moment, it was Donald Trump coming down the escalator and talking about Mexico sending their worst people. But remember that that was Donald Trump's entire history in New York. The Central Park accused perpetrators, none of whom turned out to be guilty, but he called for their execution. He has a long, deep history of really unvarnished racial animus.

And that gave people the opportunity to exhibit it. Now, the sad thing is that the social scientist in me has to tell you that it had to have been there all along. He didn't create racism. Those racialized sentiments existed in those populations. He merely made it acceptable to say out loud. And my own sense is that this society is really closest to the breaking point. It has been really since the mid-1960s. Like, we are coming apart at the seams.

You know, people have, I got to, I'm going to pontificate about this for a second. You know, last week, someone attempted to assassinate the Speaker of the House. No one's phrasing it in that term. Yeah. But this guy went in there with the attention of killing her. And instead, he hit an 82-year-old man in the head with a hammer. And that's considered a laugh line by the other side's candidates. That's where we are.

Right. Well, I mean, on that note, so what I try to tell my, no, no, no, look, dude, we believe me, we're not known for our optimism here at this show. So, like, I try to tell myself when it comes to things like that. Like, we've already talked about how unpopular their actual policies are. And then now lately they're like, you know, they're trying to get rid of Social Security and Medicare and stuff. So it's like even, you know, the seniors in their base or whatever, it seems like they're. antagonizing and the way young people in Generation Z and all this stuff, and I try to tell myself, like, it's just not sustainable for them to be this extreme and this unlikable and this antagonistic towards so many different demographics of the American populace, like, that it will, because of, if nothing else but that, as long as they're not allowed to completely, you know, rip the foundations

of democracy asunder and just institute an authoritarian rule, if we can avoid that happening, that it has to work itself out eventually, just for those reasons. But, like, is that naive? And, you know, is that stupid? Is that, like, what are we really looking at here? Italian fascism and German fascism took a world war to turn back. Spanish fascism dominated the country for 40 years.

I'm sorry. I don't think it just works itself out. The Republican candidate for governor in Wisconsin, who may well win tonight, said that if he gets elected, Republicans will never lose another election in Wisconsin. He is so going to cook the legal establishment. We're experiencing that now at the national level. I mean, there's a reason why John Roberts gives Trump yet more time, like in every opportunity there is for Republican judges,

Republican legislators or whatever to modify the electorate and modify the rules to improve their chances they're taking it. So I don't believe tonight democracy is on the ballot per se, but I do believe in 2024 it is. If the Republicans emerge from the 24 election with unified national government, we have a major problem. After Republicans retake the House, what would you expect from a House on American Activities Committee,

by Marjor, Taylor Green. What would you expect to come out? Boy, could be anything. Finally, that investigation of Bert and Ernie to see a really indoctrinating children, it could be freaking anything. Yeah. You know, Kevin McCarthy is a Wiley operator.

I do not know if he will put her in any position to be front and center. He's not, you know, he's not the brightest ball in the Christmas tree, but he's not a complete fool. But you never know. He might be pressured to by dear leader. Yeah. Anything could happen. The, I mean, the one thing I feel could be, I don't know, I'm just, we're just guessing about the future here.

But, like, a Republican House is going to be so bad shit that it could guarantee Biden reelection in 2024. So maybe that's one race they can't gerrymander, but like, it's still. It's fucking insane that we're here right now. Right, right. No, but they can't gerrymander, but to the extent that they can modify, to the extent that they can run interference to prevent any form of national reform from taking place,

then Republican secretaries of state and election deniers in various states can make their plans to muck up the works in terms of electoral vote distribution. And don't forget, there's this weird case pending in front of the Supreme Court, the clearly, sober, carefully considering Supreme Court to essentially empower state legislatures to do whatever the hell they want.

The independent state legislature theory is what's called, right? That's one. And if you get that, then all bets are off. Then democracy in the United States is already dead. Well, on that delightful note, we're going to let you go soon, Dr. Segura. this has been a very illuminating conversation. I'm glad you joined us. But normally in this situation,

we'd ask somebody if you had things to plug or whatever, but is there just whatever parting thoughts you have, anything you want to leave people with? And again, we appreciate it. I don't have anything to plug. Yeah. But I will say that, you know, I believed for most of my life in American democracy,

I hope I still do. And, you know, my father fought in the Second World War and an uncle die in Korea. A lot of people put forward a lot of effort to get us to a place that we could do the things that we did in the 20th century in the early 21st. And we can be at that place again, but it just requires us to swallow hard, lick our wounds a little bit, and then get back in the fight. So that's where I'll do it. Right on. Well, thank you very much.

We appreciate you. Dr. Garris Sigura, everybody. Thank you. See, that Saints Saddle send you off with a who day. I don't even want to talk about football but I wanted to let you know I have my roots down there All right

Thank you sir Appreciate you Wait the Saints and Bengals One's Hoot Ad and once Hoot A I think I got a mixed up I can't remember off the other time Oh you said Houdai Yeah Saints are Houdat

Bengals Hiday Yeah Yeah All right All right well Matt Yeah Yeah find some questions and comments For us and whatnot also

I'm going to look now for the first time. Looks like Bill Lee won in Tennessee. Everybody knew that was coming. I hate him so much, but, yeah, that was not unexpected. Maryland elected the state's first black governor, Democrat West Moore.

Let's see. The Associated Press called the Florida governor's race for Ron DeSantis. Yeah. Already. Stacey Ham is probably going to lose. But Warnock's close. Marjor Taylor Green, dog walked our boy, Marcus Flowers. Yeah, we figured that.

In Florida's, I can't find the number of the congressional district, but a congressional district in Florida, Florida has elected the first Gen Z candidate. Maxwell Alejandro Frost defeated Republican Calvin Wimbish. That's a good Republican name. Florida's 13th District, 25-year-old gun reform and social justice activists, heavily blue Orlando area district. So, I'll thank you.

Debbie Lynn Robinson says, hit the like button, everybody, yes, like and share, subscribe, tell your friends, write and review on the podcast version, all that good stuff. I like that name, Calvin Wimbich. That's like a gilded age Republican name. It sounds like he's hanging out

with like uh the Vanderbiltz or something yeah yeah he's trying to pass a law to require bow ties in school or something yeah oh good good i like dr cigar man he's a place of fun talk um yeah yeah it's like it's nice to hear sober calm like it's like yeah it's gonna be bad for a little while but we can fix it right you know it might be it might be a long time horizon but you know people go through shit that's fine they do yeah is there anything about we don't know anything about like Walker and Warnock or

Oz and Federman or none of that right like that's all still very much up in the air I imagine I don't know if some parts of some the East Coast polls haven't closed I know it's not a clock it's not a clock there but let's see Pennsylvania sallies

uh This is a good podcast. Logotick, Legothic, something like that on YouTube. It says Dr. Seguera was cool as shit. I'd hang with him. Yeah, me too. With 9% of votes in Pennsylvania, John Fetterman is winning 75% to 23.

Okay. I'll go ahead mark that one down, surely. Yeah. I've seen enough. Nutrient Miracle says Warnock is leading with 52% right now. But yeah, I don't know what the percent reported. is but yeah it'll be a minute that's why we uh you know we realize like a lot of this shit no one's going to know for hours and hours and hours so we're not just going to sit here the whole time

we do a do a regular show and call it because nobody's nobody's watching us to we're not going to be breaking any of these races or anything yeah i mean it's like like cities coming faster because they have more money and bigger and better infrastructure and then like the rural counties that are going to vote for oz like it's like two little old ladies hand counting ballots They've got to figure out how to phone up, phone up the state headquarters and get the numbers in. But isn't there also, so Candace, on Facebook says, I'm praying Shapiro wins. I'm in Pennsylvania. Our polls just closed.

But isn't it like the revert, there's sometimes a red mirage because of like mail-in voting or whatever, stuff like that? Like there's another, like you said, cities are like coming in first, but there's other elements of it that work in the opposite direction, don't they? So Pennsylvania should be a red mirage state. Because they won't count. Because it was in 2020. It was a red-orogic situation. Yeah, that's what the whole stop-the-count thing happened. Yeah, right.

So like the mail-in ballots get counted like tonight and tomorrow and they should increase veteran's vote count. Yeah. I'm sure like the 75% is because Pennsylvania precincts came out. Bridget Muleberger says, great show. I'm going to go drink myself to sleep and wake up in 1950. yeah yeah probably uh i think i'm charles craw or yeah charles cry says where's georgia correspondent corey to explain

mtg winning again yeah maybe we need to have him on next week give his response to it on the well-read podcast this week which we recorded yesterday he very much predicted a big win for her and he had little to nothing in the way of hope so he's not going to be like surprised or anything like that. He's not happy about it. Corey was in a commercial for Stacey Abrams and it came on at a Halloween party. He was at a couple weeks ago and he almost got in a fist bite over it.

That's true. He's actually putting a skin in this game. Me and Corey did a couple of Stacey Abrams ads and then the big one though was just Corey you know and

apparently it got ran during like the Georgia football game. And, yeah, people didn't take too kindly to it, I guess. Although, in my head, it was like, and he said he was like, we knew you was a liberal queer, but we didn't know you was bought and paid for, you know, because

I mean, it's a bought and paid for, Cognos. Yeah, right. So, uh, yeah. But he made it. He made it out. He didn't have to whip anybody's ass, give anybody what fur, nothing like that. The funny part was, like, Corey's not drinking. So, yeah, he,

He was more likely to fight because he was stoned sober at a party. He was football. Right. Yeah. On that note, because I pumped him up last week, Corey's dogs did handle my Tennessee volunteers, but I still think we have a shot at the playoff if the right. We need some help now, right?

Teams lose. We can still get in. Tom Cookewer on Facebook says Tim Ryan is currently ahead in Ohio. That's the one that would make me feel. I just want to be so sad. I just want them to look in the mirror and be like, why did I do this for, why did I waste two years in my life? Well, again, and I also, I think it's an interesting case because we've talked before on here in the past few weeks about that, about that race that, like, Tim Ryan has kind of, frankly, gone against every major lesson I thought I had taken away from recent elections, meaning like the idea that like, you know, go hard or go home, basically. Phil Bredesen in Tennessee when he ran against Marshall Blackburn,

he tried to play both sides, right? He tried to placate the Republicans and be like, no, I'm all right. I'm one of the good ones. And he got his ass whip. And so ever since then, I've been like, you can't do that shit. That don't work.

You've got to dig in and just be who you are. That's horse shit. But Tim Ryan has been doing that the whole time. And if that ends up working, even still, I won't know if it's more of a, that's just how much JD don't, J.D. Don't hit situation or what. But, yeah, I find it interesting because I would have told

you that that was a terrible strategy. But, you know, I don't know anything. Yeah, Tim Ryan sort of ran as a sane Republican versus the insane Republican, which you're right. It's not like I, but also like as a political science experiment, you got to factor in the way J.D. Vance comes across on TV is like a guy who would finger your dog if you left him along with it. No, I know.

I mean, that's why I said, that's why I said, even if that does happen, it doesn't necessarily mean that. It's just more about J.D. Vance than is Tim Ryan. Zion Curiamma says. Ohio Democrat here. If Tim Ryan wins, I will gleefully eat a boot. We hear you, brother, or sister, as the case may be. All right, well, that's it.

We're all going to go, well, you know, watch the coming storm together, I suppose. Well, no, not together, spiritually together. Anyway, go to Trey Crowder.com, get some tickets come see me live. We'll have a lot to talk about for sure. And you can support this show on Patreon, weekly skews.com slash more or go on Patreon to look me up. Like I said, later this week, when we actually have results from the midterms, we're going to be doing an episode all about those results, a Patreon episode.

So check that out. And, yeah, stay strong, everybody. Hang in there. We'll see you next week. Love you. Bye.