Latest / The Chuck ToddCast / Chuck’s Commentary - Trump’s Trade Wars Are Directly Impacting The Battleground States… & The Midterms + Mark Walter Is The Canary In The Coal Mine

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Chuck’s Commentary - Trump’s Trade Wars Are Directly Impacting The Battleground States… & The Midterms + Mark Walter Is The Canary In The Coal Mine · The Chuck ToddCast

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Speaker 1: This episode of The Chuck Podcast is brought to you
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Speaker 1: by Chapter. Now, almost everything you hear about medicare is
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Speaker 1: I think there's all sorts of space. You see a
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Speaker 1: lot of people are throwing themselves in this healthcare space.
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Speaker 1: When I like about these Chapter folks, I've spent time
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Speaker 1: with them. This is a very transparent organization. It is Medicare,
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Speaker 1: and all of its affiliated stuff can be very confusing.
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Speaker 1: and less confusing. Okay, so look, take this cupticism you
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Speaker 1: three four three nine eight five, Hello Aaron, Welcome to
2:18
Speaker 1: the Monday edition of The Chuck Podcast. We are still
2:22
Speaker 1: in our summer schedule, so let me give you a
2:24
Speaker 1: bit of a promotional rundown both of this episode and
2:28
Speaker 1: of the week. A few other programming notes my newspare
2:31
Speaker 1: show this week. If you're curious about something called the
2:34
Speaker 1: China Shock, I did a deep dive on the on
2:37
Speaker 1: the China Shock and what do I mean by the
2:39
Speaker 1: China shock the fact that China was actually an oil
2:43
Speaker 1: shock absorber. One of the biggest stories that didn't happen
2:47
Speaker 1: so far in the fallout of the Iran War is
2:50
Speaker 1: a huge surge in the price of oil. We've certainly
2:54
Speaker 1: seen a rise in the price of oil, we have
2:57
Speaker 1: seen a rise in energy prices, but it is not
3:00
Speaker 1: been a trigger for a global recession that many folks feared.
3:04
Speaker 1: And the question is why While we apparently we've all
3:07
Speaker 1: underestimated two things about China, One how much oil they
3:11
Speaker 1: have had in reserve and to its capacity to absorb
3:15
Speaker 1: this shock. They basically didn't purchase have not purchased the
3:18
Speaker 1: amount of oil, and they have not consumed the amount
3:21
Speaker 1: of oil that they normally consume. China being the closed
3:24
Speaker 1: society that it is does not share a lot of
3:26
Speaker 1: economic data that most of the rest of the world does.
3:29
Speaker 1: So we've always had to sort of estimate exactly how
3:33
Speaker 1: much oil you sort of you do it by subtraction.
3:37
Speaker 1: You sort of see where everybody else is reported, and
3:40
Speaker 1: then essentially you estimate what's missing and assume that that's
3:44
Speaker 1: China share. But apparently what they've been doing. One is
3:47
Speaker 1: their transition to alternative energy sources have allowed them to
3:50
Speaker 1: absorb this. Two, they have clearly stored a lot more oil,
3:55
Speaker 1: and their stockpile is a lot greater because they used
3:58
Speaker 1: a lot of their stockpile. But they did it for
4:00
Speaker 1: an interesting reason, right They you know, as essentially the
4:05
Speaker 1: world's exporter of things of you know, the last thing
4:10
Speaker 1: they wanted was their two biggest markets, North America and
4:13
Speaker 1: Europe in a massive recession. So they try to minimize
4:18
Speaker 1: the economic toll of the energy markets in order to
4:20
Speaker 1: prop up their own economy and their own exports. Anyway,
4:23
Speaker 1: it's a fascinating reminder of a couple things. One, this
4:26
Speaker 1: is what you know, an interconnected globe does have country.
4:29
Speaker 1: You know, they could easily decide to punish the rest
4:32
Speaker 1: of the world. They chose not to because punishing the
4:34
Speaker 1: rest of the world would have also punished themselves. So
4:39
Speaker 1: I wanted to understand this. But the bottom line is this,
4:41
Speaker 1: and this is what you'll take away from news Fair.
4:43
Speaker 1: China is now more a bigger essentially can have more
4:47
Speaker 1: impact on the energy markets than Opek. Just sit with that.
4:52
Speaker 1: China is now that big. They they are, their economy
4:57
Speaker 1: is that big, and their ability to essentially alter the
5:02
Speaker 1: energy markets is as influential as Opek was. Anyway, that
5:05
Speaker 1: is my deep dive with Newsphare this week. I definitely
5:08
Speaker 1: would like you to check you out, and of course
5:09
Speaker 1: in my sports history podcast with my pal ja Adonde
5:12
Speaker 1: at Dynastic Pod. Please go over to that YouTube page
5:15
Speaker 1: at Dynastic Pod, please go like and subscribe. We have
5:19
Speaker 1: incredible deep dive on the history of the Alabama football program.
5:24
Speaker 1: You know, each one of these is is like a
5:27
Speaker 1: new child to me. I just love every one of
5:30
Speaker 1: our episodes. So you know, don't get me wrong, but
5:33
Speaker 1: you know I'm a huge college football fan, a huge
5:35
Speaker 1: college football amateur historian. Jaa is also a huge college
5:40
Speaker 1: football fan, and it all comes through in this episode. Look,
5:45
Speaker 1: I'll just give you one incredible factoid that will I
5:50
Speaker 1: hope make you want to come. You know, there's a lot.
5:52
Speaker 1: I always want to have a little g whiz facts
5:55
Speaker 1: that I that we drop into this And my favorite nugget,
5:59
Speaker 1: Bear bru I got plastic surgery in the last two
6:02
Speaker 1: years as coach of Alabama. Just sit with that. Bear
6:05
Speaker 1: Bryant got plastic surgery in the late seventies early eighties.
6:09
Speaker 1: I just found that to be one of the more
6:12
Speaker 1: fascinating things that well, I did not know that as
6:17
Speaker 1: an old comedian used to imitate there anyway, So please
6:20
Speaker 1: go check that out. It's a terrific episode. And later
6:25
Speaker 1: this week I'm interviewing Jay and I are going to
6:26
Speaker 1: be interviewing a legendary Alabama talk radio meister and journalistic
6:32
Speaker 1: extraordinaire back in his old days of covering all things
6:35
Speaker 1: SEC football, none other than mister Paul Finebaum. And we're
6:40
Speaker 1: here to celebrate Alabama football. I got a great compliment
6:43
Speaker 1: from somebody who said, who's a listener of this podcast
6:48
Speaker 1: and knows it figures you know, as a Miami guy,
6:51
Speaker 1: I assume you don't like the SEC, which probably means
6:53
Speaker 1: you don't like Alabama. And I could not tell when
6:56
Speaker 1: listening to that podcast you really did. You really made
7:01
Speaker 1: a podcast that even US Alabama fans will learn something
7:04
Speaker 1: and enjoy. So shout out to that listener, appreciate you
7:08
Speaker 1: sending me that note. And look, I can compartmentalize, and
7:14
Speaker 1: I'm well aware that when Miami had its run in
7:17
Speaker 1: the eighties, all we could say was Miami was the
7:19
Speaker 1: next Alabama. And as I've told my son, I said,
7:22
Speaker 1: before Alabama, the second round of Alabama. Miami was Alabama
7:26
Speaker 1: before Nick Saban's Alabama. So I'm well aware of Miami's
7:31
Speaker 1: place in college football history. It's up there, it's high,
7:34
Speaker 1: does not surpass Alabama, and I think that our special
7:38
Speaker 1: reflects that. Look, I spent the last four days moving
7:43
Speaker 1: my son back into school, and I want to give
7:46
Speaker 1: a couple of just I guess call them life life
7:49
Speaker 1: hacks for you, one man, kudos to you, Haul. I'm
7:53
Speaker 1: not Look, everybody I'm shouting out here does not a
7:55
Speaker 1: sponsor and doesn't Amy and I did not make any agreement.
7:59
Speaker 1: I'm just here to share some I know many of
8:01
Speaker 1: you are in a similar position as I am. You've
8:04
Speaker 1: got kids either getting ready to go to college or
8:07
Speaker 1: in college. And you're doing moves maybe second or third year,
8:10
Speaker 1: you're going to an apartment, all this stuff. God love it, man,
8:14
Speaker 1: you Hall's got this great just sort of a few
8:18
Speaker 1: hours if you need to rent a cargo van, because
8:21
Speaker 1: you know, I went out of my way to avoid
8:24
Speaker 1: IKEA furniture. We were another shout out to my friends
8:29
Speaker 1: at the World Market, which, of course the prices are
8:32
Speaker 1: only going to go up thanks to tariffs, but it
8:35
Speaker 1: is a very affordable was place to furnish a first
8:39
Speaker 1: apartment without one being gouged in prices and two having
8:45
Speaker 1: to sit for hours to put together furniture. So just
8:49
Speaker 1: wanted to shout those two things out. And then my
8:52
Speaker 1: meal of the weekend, I just think I've discovered the
8:55
Speaker 1: greatest fried chicken of all time, at least fast food
8:58
Speaker 1: fried chicken. I was a gas station, grocery store fried
9:01
Speaker 1: chicken guy. I always thought the best fried chicken in
9:03
Speaker 1: America is at gas stations in the South. I still
9:07
Speaker 1: think some of the best fried chicken in America is
9:09
Speaker 1: at gas stations in the South. But if you're looking
9:13
Speaker 1: for fast food fried chicken, I think I found the
9:15
Speaker 1: best fried chicken I've ever had. It's for a fast
9:18
Speaker 1: food chain, and it surpasses grocery store Fried Chicken, which
9:23
Speaker 1: here in the DMB. Giant has always been the number
9:27
Speaker 1: one grocery store fried chicken here in the DMB. But
9:31
Speaker 1: I want you, guys, I know it's a chain these days,
9:34
Speaker 1: it's all over it's apparently a Filipino recipe. Jolly be
9:38
Speaker 1: Oh my god, it's not greasy, and it's outstanding. Anyway,
9:41
Speaker 1: I just wanted to give a few of those shoutouts
9:43
Speaker 1: a few life path And if you're wondering about my
9:45
Speaker 1: kidney stones, great news I have two. The good news
9:50
Speaker 1: is that I've now gotten through the pain portions of
9:53
Speaker 1: both of them. And now we just wait. And for
9:56
Speaker 1: those of you that had stones, you know what that means.
9:58
Speaker 1: We just wait, all right. I want to get to
10:03
Speaker 1: my main sort of points of the day here. And look,
10:05
Speaker 1: there's a lot of stuff that's bouncing around my political
10:08
Speaker 1: notebook from the weekend. There's this argument over polling. We've
10:11
Speaker 1: got some interesting new analysis out of Florida that I
10:14
Speaker 1: want to share with you. The mess at the Pentagon,
10:17
Speaker 1: you know the credit. Look, it's not new that Pete
10:20
Speaker 1: Haigseth is running the Pentagon into the ground. But man,
10:22
Speaker 1: the credibility gets worse and worse with what's happened with
10:24
Speaker 1: Stars and Stripes. Republicans have found religion on AI. That's
10:29
Speaker 1: fascinating to me. We got a few updates on Michigan
10:32
Speaker 1: and APAK. I want to get into that, and that
10:34
Speaker 1: very interesting Jared Kushner Akeem Jeffrey's meeting that has lit
10:38
Speaker 1: the extremes of the internet on fire. The rights pissed
10:41
Speaker 1: off about the meeting, and the left pissed off that
10:43
Speaker 1: the meeting exit. And then we're going to close things
10:45
Speaker 1: out before I get to Kasik with a little update
10:48
Speaker 1: on the Mark Walter story, because I've spent some more
10:51
Speaker 1: time reporting on that story, and if anything, I feel
10:55
Speaker 1: even better about the special report we did, and I
10:57
Speaker 1: was glad you guys really consumed a lot more of
11:00
Speaker 1: it than even I expected. It's I think, a very
11:03
Speaker 1: important story because this is not about the Lakers. This
11:06
Speaker 1: is not about sports. This is about how do we
11:09
Speaker 1: know we're not seeing the beginnings of the next major
11:12
Speaker 1: financial crisis. But we've got to start with Canada, Oh Canada,
11:17
Speaker 1: because I don't think what happened this weekend is merely
11:19
Speaker 1: another Trump tariff story. This is a lot bigger than that.
11:23
Speaker 1: The trade talks between the US and Canada collapse. A
11:26
Speaker 1: fifty percent American tariffs have kicked in. Canada is preparing
11:30
Speaker 1: a dollar for dollar retaliation timing of this, Could it
11:33
Speaker 1: get any worse? If you're a Republican running for office
11:36
Speaker 1: less than eighty days to election day, good job, good
11:41
Speaker 1: job Trump administration. You are the single greatest ally to
11:44
Speaker 1: Chuck Schumer and I came Jeffreys at this point, but
11:46
Speaker 1: still here we are. America's oldest, closest and most integrated
11:50
Speaker 1: allies is now publicly saying something extraordinary, Mark Carney. He
11:55
Speaker 1: said the United States cannot necessarily be trusted to keep
11:58
Speaker 1: its work. He said this quote. We recognized from the
12:01
Speaker 1: start that America has changed. He said the United States
12:04
Speaker 1: was using economic integration quote as a weapon, and then
12:07
Speaker 1: he said this the United States its signature was written
12:11
Speaker 1: in pencil. That's an incredible thing for a Canadian Prime
12:16
Speaker 1: minister to say about an American government. As an American citizen,
12:20
Speaker 1: it's gut. It's a gut punch. It's embarrassing. You can't
12:25
Speaker 1: trust an agreement with the United States. Maybe it's an agreement.
12:29
Speaker 1: Maybe somebody gets out the eraser tomorrow is essentially what
12:31
Speaker 1: Carnee is saying. Carney said Canada was looking for a
12:34
Speaker 1: deal that respected its sovereignty, obviously something Trump does not respect.
12:38
Speaker 1: He says it all the time with that fifty first
12:40
Speaker 1: state garbage. And he summed up the failed negotiations pretty simply, quote,
12:44
Speaker 1: we cannot accept what they've offered, and we will not
12:46
Speaker 1: give what they've asked. And asked whether Canada was now
12:50
Speaker 1: in a trade war with the United States, Carney's answer
12:53
Speaker 1: was essentially, well, you're at war when you get attacked.
12:57
Speaker 1: So he basically said, yeah, Canada is at war, is
13:01
Speaker 1: in a trade war with the United States, and the
13:03
Speaker 1: United States fired the first shot. Sit with that for
13:06
Speaker 1: a second, and then remember Davos, because if this sounds familiar,
13:11
Speaker 1: it should remember Carney's speech at Davos back in January,
13:16
Speaker 1: because we are now watching what is essentially now the
13:18
Speaker 1: second half of that speech play out in real time.
13:21
Speaker 1: Carney said the world wasn't going through a transition, it
13:24
Speaker 1: was going through a rupture. He talked about great powers
13:28
Speaker 1: increasingly using economic integration as coercion, you know, behaving like
13:33
Speaker 1: mob bosses, and he warned the middle powers right about
13:40
Speaker 1: the temptation to accommodate, don't make trouble, keep your head down,
13:45
Speaker 1: give the big country what it wants, hope that compliance
13:48
Speaker 1: buys you safety. And then Carney said, well, guess what
13:52
Speaker 1: it won't. That was the whole middle power argument when
13:56
Speaker 1: he said these middle powers need to band together. And
13:58
Speaker 1: when he's thinking middle power, you know, basically at the
14:01
Speaker 1: top edge, he's you know, thinking India, Japan, basically all
14:05
Speaker 1: of Western Europe. He says, essentially leaving out China, the
14:08
Speaker 1: United States, and I guess whatever you want to call Russia,
14:11
Speaker 1: which is still more of a gas station with nuclear
14:13
Speaker 1: weapons than anything else, but still it obviously behaves in
14:17
Speaker 1: a similar way. Countries such as Canada cannot individually out
14:22
Speaker 1: muscle the United States, and he knows it. So he's
14:25
Speaker 1: decided that the answer for Canada's diversification, he's got to
14:29
Speaker 1: build other trade relationships. He's going to have to build
14:31
Speaker 1: other security relationships. He's going to have to reduce the
14:33
Speaker 1: leverage that a great power can use against you. He
14:36
Speaker 1: does not want to be subservient to the United States.
14:40
Speaker 1: Maybe the United States of the twentieth century was worth
14:43
Speaker 1: being subservient to, because maybe we had trustworthy leadership, but
14:46
Speaker 1: with this administration, right, I mean, this is this is
14:49
Speaker 1: the damage Donald Trump has done to America. Folks. This
14:52
Speaker 1: is not And I know some will hear this on
14:55
Speaker 1: the right and think it's a partisan argument. Look, you
14:59
Speaker 1: know by now you should know no great fan of
15:02
Speaker 1: the Democratic leadership that we have in this country. But
15:05
Speaker 1: there's poor leadership, and then there's Unamerican leadership. The Democrats
15:09
Speaker 1: are pro American and just bad at this. Donald Trump's
15:14
Speaker 1: an American and that's a whole level of problem. And
15:18
Speaker 1: the Republicans that just sit there quietly and essentially take
15:21
Speaker 1: this punishment and have allowed the hijacking of this. Your
15:25
Speaker 1: silence is complicity, and that's a huge issue. But when
15:29
Speaker 1: you negotiate one on one with this big, giant country
15:32
Speaker 1: like this, you're negotiating from weakness. And Carne knew it.
15:36
Speaker 1: Carney's warning was it simply giving in while pretending you're
15:38
Speaker 1: still sovereign isn't really sovereignty at all. So now his
15:43
Speaker 1: words have been put to the test by Donald Trump.
15:45
Speaker 1: Because Donald Trump kept pushing, Carney decided he'd rather absorb
15:49
Speaker 1: economic pain than accept the terms. He's got public support
15:53
Speaker 1: behind him for now, right. Trade wars at first can
15:57
Speaker 1: feel patriotic, and then you know the public could get
16:01
Speaker 1: tired of it because they're having to pay the price.
16:04
Speaker 1: But this does make Canada different, and there's a distinction
16:07
Speaker 1: here worth making. Because Europe complained about what Trump was doing.
16:11
Speaker 1: European leaders push back some Macron has pushed back Merz
16:16
Speaker 1: and Germany has pushed back, and there's been considerably more
16:19
Speaker 1: resistance to Trump than there was six months ago. But
16:22
Speaker 1: ultimately the European Union took the coercive trade deal. Individual
16:28
Speaker 1: European governments accepted the Trump tariff structure rather than risk
16:32
Speaker 1: the alternative of total rupture with the United States. But
16:35
Speaker 1: Canada decided to make the opposite calculation. And I have
16:40
Speaker 1: to tell you, the whole world is rooting for this guy.
16:42
Speaker 1: Don't think they're not. That's why Carnei interests me so much.
16:47
Speaker 1: I'm struggling to think of another democratic leader in the
16:49
Speaker 1: Western Alliance who is currently challenging Trump this comprehensively and
16:54
Speaker 1: is willing to absorb this much economic risk in order
16:57
Speaker 1: to do it. It's noble and those of us that
17:00
Speaker 1: care about freedom around the world and care about free
17:03
Speaker 1: markets and fair trade, we should all be thankful for
17:07
Speaker 1: Mark Carney. Mark Carney is the guy working harder to
17:13
Speaker 1: save democracy, perhaps right now around the world, than any
17:16
Speaker 1: other leader in the world outside of Zelenski, who's in
17:19
Speaker 1: the middle of fighting a war for it. So if
17:25
Speaker 1: I'm sitting in Paris or Berlin or London or Tokyo
17:28
Speaker 1: or Canberra, you're watching, and I'm watching very closely from
17:32
Speaker 1: those places, because Carney is testing whether saying no actually works. Right.
17:37
Speaker 1: We've always thought Trump's kind of a bully, and like
17:39
Speaker 1: most bullies, if you punch him in the nose, he
17:41
Speaker 1: can back down. Right. We don't have the Taco acronym
17:45
Speaker 1: for nothing. Trump always chickens out. He'd already chicken out
17:48
Speaker 1: once with this Canada threat. It doesn't go into effect
17:51
Speaker 1: for another week, folks, another couple of weeks. Technically, does
17:55
Speaker 1: he chicken out after this? Does he come back with
17:57
Speaker 1: a better deal for Canada. I'll get into that in
17:59
Speaker 1: the menuat But I can tell you a whole bunch
18:03
Speaker 1: of America's allies are cheering Canada because Carneie has the
18:08
Speaker 1: you know whats that the European Union did not have
18:12
Speaker 1: at a minimum. There certainly have an enormous interest in
18:15
Speaker 1: this outcome. So if Canada can demonstrate that a middle
18:17
Speaker 1: power can withstand American economic coercion here, everybody else will
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19:58
Speaker 1: twenty six. What should make even crazier. We were really
20:05
Speaker 1: close to having a deal, Jamison Greer, Trump's own trade
20:08
Speaker 1: rep reportedly had already negotiated what was basically a wall
20:12
Speaker 1: to wall deal. It was basically a done deal over
20:15
Speaker 1: the last week. They were really close, close enough that
20:18
Speaker 1: there was a framework, and then it blew up within hours. Now,
20:22
Speaker 1: part of it was apparently new American demands that Canada
20:26
Speaker 1: decided crossed a line on sovereignty, culture and its ability
20:29
Speaker 1: to negotiate trade agreements with other countries. But what's interesting here,
20:34
Speaker 1: and this is true of so much of the Trumpet
20:36
Speaker 1: years and the Trump administration, there's not unity inside the
20:40
Speaker 1: Trump administration on this deal. Our friends of political reports
20:44
Speaker 1: at the Commerce Secretary, Howard Lutnick, who of course has
20:46
Speaker 1: been mister He's been the biggest promoter of this tariff nonsense,
20:50
Speaker 1: and he has been he has created all sorts of
20:53
Speaker 1: problems in the past on this tariff nonsense. Well he
20:56
Speaker 1: did it again. Apparently he believed that the framework that
20:59
Speaker 1: was negotiated by the actual America negotiator, the US Trade Rep. Greer,
21:04
Speaker 1: had essentially been sprung on him at Commerce. He didn't
21:07
Speaker 1: like it. He didn't get to And I have no
21:10
Speaker 1: doubt I know how the Trump administration works. People were
21:13
Speaker 1: trying to keep Lutnik out of the room. Lutnick is
21:15
Speaker 1: a comes in there and damages things. He screwed up
21:19
Speaker 1: a whole bunch of stuff previously. And there is an
21:21
Speaker 1: entire network of folks in the Trump administration that tries
21:24
Speaker 1: to work around him a little bit kind of like
21:25
Speaker 1: Peter Navarro, how people try to work around Peter Navarro, frankly,
21:30
Speaker 1: kind of like, what's happening with this this Natalie Harp
21:32
Speaker 1: story where it's clearly somebody inside the West wing desperately
21:36
Speaker 1: wants to get Harp out of that West wing, and
21:37
Speaker 1: she sees her as a problem because all do you
21:41
Speaker 1: think these leaks are coming from any I mean, all
21:44
Speaker 1: of those leaks are coming from inside the house. But
21:46
Speaker 1: I digress. So Greer almost had a deal, and then
21:51
Speaker 1: another part of the administration, Lutnik comes in and says, oh,
21:54
Speaker 1: nobody ran this by us, so we need to know
21:57
Speaker 1: more about this. But it certainly looks like his pastor's prologue.
22:01
Speaker 1: Here Lutnick torpedo the deal, and it made it look
22:04
Speaker 1: like I mean, now, did Lutnik do this on his own?
22:07
Speaker 1: Did Trump want Lutnik to do this? And to move
22:09
Speaker 1: the goalpost? Is a commerce that added all these late
22:12
Speaker 1: demands via Trump? Did Trump not go to Greer and
22:15
Speaker 1: went to Lutnik who decided this framework wasn't enough because
22:19
Speaker 1: this wasn't simply Canada and America negotiated and couldn't get there.
22:23
Speaker 1: It increasingly looks like the United States may not have
22:25
Speaker 1: been negotiating with one voice, which frankly is typical in
22:29
Speaker 1: the Trump years and why the world doesn't trust America
22:32
Speaker 1: at the moment. So if you're carning this issue, reinforces
22:38
Speaker 1: your entire point. America's signs its deals in pencil and
22:43
Speaker 1: you don't know who has the eraser. Now here's the thing.
22:48
Speaker 1: Let's talk about the political fallout for this. Let's bring
22:50
Speaker 1: this home because the political timing on this is just astonishing.
22:54
Speaker 1: And again I go back, if you're Chuck Schumer, nackem Chuffish,
22:58
Speaker 1: you're like, thank you, MVP award to Howard Lutnick here
23:02
Speaker 1: if you indeed of the one that blew this up,
23:05
Speaker 1: Because here are some of the Senate races that I'm
23:07
Speaker 1: watching come all over, right, all of them are impacted
23:11
Speaker 1: by this. Maine, New Hampshire, Ohio, Michigan, Minnesota, Iowa, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas,
23:18
Speaker 1: North Carolina, Georgia, Texas. Those are that's that's her Senate battleground, right,
23:24
Speaker 1: that's the large Senate playing field. I left at Alaska
23:29
Speaker 1: and Alaska. Sorry, Now, how many of those states have
23:33
Speaker 1: Canada as one of their most important foreign markets? Almost
23:37
Speaker 1: all of them? Ready for this. Canada is the number
23:40
Speaker 1: one export market for Maine, number one for Michigan, number
23:44
Speaker 1: one for Ohio, number one for Minnesota, number one for Iowa,
23:48
Speaker 1: number one for South Dakota, North Carolina and Georgia. And
23:51
Speaker 1: it's number two for New Hampshire, number two for Kansas,
23:55
Speaker 1: and number two for Texas. So eleven of these twelve
24:03
Speaker 1: Senate races, Canada is either number one or number two
24:07
Speaker 1: for a trading partner with the States. These aren't trivial relationships, folks.
24:12
Speaker 1: More than forty percent of mainz goods that are exported
24:16
Speaker 1: go to Canada. Nearly forty percent of Michigan's exports go
24:21
Speaker 1: to Canada, about a third of Ohio's, roughly thirty percent
24:25
Speaker 1: of Iowa's, nearly half of South Dakota's. This isn't some
24:33
Speaker 1: distant foreign policy disputes that Senate candidates can safely ignore.
24:39
Speaker 1: Donald Trump has dropped a trade war directly into the
24:42
Speaker 1: economies of some of the most important states on the
24:44
Speaker 1: twenty twenty six map back of a job Trumpet and
24:49
Speaker 1: Susan Collins may be the cleanest example of this. And
24:53
Speaker 1: she's vocal, she ask to be she better fight this,
24:57
Speaker 1: and she's trying sort of. He's warning the administration that
25:01
Speaker 1: this creates massive uncertainty for main businesses, higher costs for
25:06
Speaker 1: main families. Canada is Main's most important foreign customer, and politically,
25:14
Speaker 1: this puts Collins in just a terrible box. And she's
25:17
Speaker 1: not the only one, but she's the best. She's the
25:19
Speaker 1: cleanest example at the moment, because part of the Susan
25:23
Speaker 1: Collins proposition has always been, Hey, you may not like
25:25
Speaker 1: this Republican president. You may not like everything my party
25:28
Speaker 1: is doing right now, but hey, I'm Susan Collins. I've
25:31
Speaker 1: been here forever. I'm I'm I'm in charge of approbes,
25:34
Speaker 1: I have access, I have influence. I'll mitigate this damage.
25:40
Speaker 1: I can protect Maine's interests. I've done this over the years. Whoops,
25:45
Speaker 1: No you can't. Donald Trump just picked a huge economic
25:49
Speaker 1: fight with Maine's biggest foreign customer, and Collins, of course
25:53
Speaker 1: is troubled. Go ahead, cue the meme. We know how
25:58
Speaker 1: troubled she gets. It's a lot of troubling things over
26:01
Speaker 1: the years that she's been troubled by, and the fact
26:04
Speaker 1: that it's become a meme in Maine is really a
26:07
Speaker 1: political problem for her. Gover forward. So her opponent now
26:10
Speaker 1: gets to ask what exactly is all this access getting made. Now, look,
26:18
Speaker 1: it's like, maybe it's not necessarily Collins's fault. This is happening,
26:22
Speaker 1: and that's precisely the problem. Her own present is undermining
26:26
Speaker 1: one of the rationales she uses to be for keeping
26:29
Speaker 1: her seat. And then there's beef. Okay, As if Republicans
26:36
Speaker 1: needed another trade headache, Trump has simultaneously created a fight
26:41
Speaker 1: with the cattle industry in this country. Now, we've been
26:44
Speaker 1: told for more than a year, by the way, that hey,
26:47
Speaker 1: tariffs don't raise prices, foreign countries pay them. Okay, obviously,
26:51
Speaker 1: we all know that's been just a bunch of dumb,
26:55
Speaker 1: just idiotic rhetoric that was backed up by no facts.
27:00
Speaker 1: But what's ironic here is that's you know, the Trump
27:04
Speaker 1: administration have been claiming that, but now they're admitting with
27:06
Speaker 1: their actions here on beef that hey, this is a problem.
27:11
Speaker 1: Suddenly beef prices are too high and the administration wants
27:15
Speaker 1: more inexpensive foreign beef entering the country to lower grocery prices. Wait,
27:20
Speaker 1: if cheaper imports lower the price Americans pay, huh, then
27:26
Speaker 1: what exactly do tariffs do? Gee? Hmmm, I mean literally,
27:31
Speaker 1: they're pissing on our leg and telling us it's raining.
27:34
Speaker 1: It's one of my favorite old Southern expressions, but this
27:39
Speaker 1: is one where it is as appropriate of use as
27:42
Speaker 1: you can come up with anyway. So now you've got
27:45
Speaker 1: Republican cattle. State senators immediately got pissed off about this deal.
27:50
Speaker 1: Deb Fisher of Nebraska said she was extremely disappointed, you know,
27:55
Speaker 1: not using quite the same language as Susan Collins and
27:59
Speaker 1: her argument those pretty straightforward. Everybody wants cheaper groceries, but
28:02
Speaker 1: you can't solve the problem by simultaneously hurting American cattle producers,
28:08
Speaker 1: which is what he's doing. So I want to give
28:10
Speaker 1: you a sense of how big is cattle country here
28:12
Speaker 1: in America. Well, cattle on feed doesn't mean every cow
28:18
Speaker 1: walking around in America, just so you know, it's what
28:20
Speaker 1: it is is. It's a us DA measurement of cattle
28:23
Speaker 1: currently in feed lots that are being prepared for slaughter.
28:29
Speaker 1: In other words, this is the immediate commercial beef production pipeline.
28:36
Speaker 1: And at the beginning of the year there were about
28:38
Speaker 1: fourteen million cattle on feed nationally. Now I want to
28:44
Speaker 1: lay that out there because I'm going to make this
28:46
Speaker 1: a Senate race story. Now take five Senate states. These
28:49
Speaker 1: are five states that have senate races that are in
28:52
Speaker 1: some form of competitiveness Nebraska, Texas, Kansas, Iowa, South Dakota
28:59
Speaker 1: Ready for this. Together, they roughly account for nine point
29:02
Speaker 1: four million of the cattle on feed right thirteen point
29:05
Speaker 1: nine So basically two thirds of the entire inventory of
29:10
Speaker 1: cattle for feed is in these five senate states, these
29:14
Speaker 1: five states who have center races on the ballot in
29:17
Speaker 1: November competitive ones, and about two thirds of the cattle
29:22
Speaker 1: headed through America's commercial feed lines. So we're dealing with
29:25
Speaker 1: enormous scale here. Kansas and Nebraska are among the biggest
29:28
Speaker 1: beef exporting states in America. By the way, imagine this
29:32
Speaker 1: double whammy. On one hand, You've got the trade war
29:35
Speaker 1: with Canada, right, that's hurting because a lot of these
29:38
Speaker 1: exports and cattle go to Canada. And then simultaneously you're
29:43
Speaker 1: lowering tariffs on imports of beef, mostly from South America,
29:50
Speaker 1: which is I mean, just it's a double whammy on
29:53
Speaker 1: these guys. So look, I'm not going to sit here
29:55
Speaker 1: and predict that Democrats are going to sweep the planes
29:58
Speaker 1: all of a sudden because Trump irritated cattle producers. But
30:01
Speaker 1: what I am saying is this is how races that
30:03
Speaker 1: aren't supposed to be competitive become a lot more competitive.
30:07
Speaker 1: And this is why number one, why I think Iowa
30:11
Speaker 1: is going to be where the blue wave crests one
30:14
Speaker 1: way or the other. Either the blue wave stops at
30:16
Speaker 1: the east, at the east end of Iowa, or it
30:20
Speaker 1: just consumes Iowa. And it is all I mean, the
30:25
Speaker 1: triple whammy of Trump policies on the Midwestern states and
30:29
Speaker 1: on the cattle states and all the ag industry, between
30:33
Speaker 1: the aggressive deportations that have that have targeted more than criminals,
30:37
Speaker 1: that have hurt them on the labor front, the terraf
30:40
Speaker 1: wars have hurt them, and now this decision. But if
30:48
Speaker 1: you start making the dominant economic constituencies in your own
30:51
Speaker 1: state's angry, that's how voters end up staying home. Okay,
30:54
Speaker 1: this is Democrats would aren't going to win over some
30:58
Speaker 1: of these voters, but those voters may stay home that
31:00
Speaker 1: are impacted directly by Trump's just erratic and crazy economic policies.
31:06
Speaker 1: And that's really the big political headline here. The Trump
31:07
Speaker 1: administration is basically working against the interests of Republicans trying
31:12
Speaker 1: to preserve their Senate majority period heart stop. Canada hurts
31:17
Speaker 1: them in those northern states that I pointed out, Beef
31:20
Speaker 1: hurts them on the planes, ag gets hit throughout the Midwest,
31:26
Speaker 1: and the aggressive immigration strategy is backfiring, right. It's upside
31:31
Speaker 1: on an immigration that doesn't help you in these sun
31:33
Speaker 1: belt states. So Republican candidates are now being forced to
31:37
Speaker 1: run against pieces of the president's economic policy while simultaneously
31:41
Speaker 1: trying to defend the absurdity of the president's economic policies.
31:46
Speaker 1: That's a lousy place to be less than three months
31:48
Speaker 1: before election there, I mean. And if you want to
31:51
Speaker 1: watch how ridiculous it is when you try to actually
31:53
Speaker 1: spin this nonsense, there's no more pathetic soul to watch
31:57
Speaker 1: than the Treasury Secretary of the United States, gott best.
32:00
Speaker 1: We know, Scott Bessett knows better. He's supposedly one of
32:04
Speaker 1: the adults in the room, but he increasingly has to
32:07
Speaker 1: be performed for an audience of one, and he now
32:11
Speaker 1: is on the record with some of the dumbest things
32:14
Speaker 1: any Treasury secretary has said in the history of the
32:17
Speaker 1: existence of a Treasury secretary. Okay Besson is increasingly become
32:23
Speaker 1: forced to defend this administration's horrendous economic record, and his
32:28
Speaker 1: sales job is obviously hard, extraordinarily hard. The terriffs, he said,
32:33
Speaker 1: weren't going to hurt American consumers, except now we're dealing
32:35
Speaker 1: with refunds because the tariffs were found to be unconstitutional.
32:39
Speaker 1: And then Besson's response is that the tariff refunds have
32:42
Speaker 1: turned into corporate welfare. Just one so dumb. So wait,
32:46
Speaker 1: how is it corporate welfare? Who collected the money, who
32:49
Speaker 1: imposed the tariffs? You don't get to take somebody's money
32:53
Speaker 1: under an illegal policy and then call returning at welfare.
32:57
Speaker 1: And the irony is that the argument tacitly is the
33:00
Speaker 1: thing the administration spent a year denying that Americans paid
33:04
Speaker 1: the tariffs. Otherwise, whom exactly are we refunding? And then
33:09
Speaker 1: we get a lousy jobs report and suddenly the argument
33:12
Speaker 1: becomes he really said this, Well, because we've deported so
33:14
Speaker 1: many people and reduced immigration, we don't actually need to
33:17
Speaker 1: produce as many jobs anymore. How about that Trump administration
33:21
Speaker 1: bragging about fewer jobs? Go ahead, good luck try that
33:25
Speaker 1: message on the campaign trail. Meanwhile, Bessett is trying to
33:29
Speaker 1: increasingly is increasingly using aggressive maneuvers to essentially get borrowing
33:35
Speaker 1: costs down temporarily. He's just trying to buy time till November. Right,
33:40
Speaker 1: So he's been essentially trying to manipulate the bond market,
33:44
Speaker 1: but he's sort of doing it by It's essentially like
33:49
Speaker 1: paying your mortgage with your credit card statement. You're now
33:52
Speaker 1: paying interest twice, if you will, the interest on your
33:56
Speaker 1: mortgage itself, and then the interest on the money you
33:59
Speaker 1: use to pay the anyway, you see where I'm going here.
34:02
Speaker 1: That's how you quickly quickly get into a spiral of debt. Well,
34:08
Speaker 1: you know, so we manipulate the bond market for a
34:10
Speaker 1: few hours and the market then said sorry. And that's
34:15
Speaker 1: the thing. That's where Bessett has been embarrassed here because
34:18
Speaker 1: the problem reality stops cooperating with a political message when
34:23
Speaker 1: it comes to numbers, right, math is math. You can
34:27
Speaker 1: only spend it so much. You can only spend a
34:29
Speaker 1: bad jobs report so much. You can only rename a
34:32
Speaker 1: tariff refund. I guess you could tell people inflation isn't
34:35
Speaker 1: really inflation, but you can't command the bond market to
34:38
Speaker 1: believe you. And yes, eventually we're gonna have to deal
34:42
Speaker 1: with the debt. And then I'm gonna save that for
34:43
Speaker 1: another monologue down the road. But both parties are lying
34:46
Speaker 1: them themselves about the debt solution. I know that everybody
34:48
Speaker 1: got worked up over the weekend that we hit the
34:50
Speaker 1: forty trillion mark. And there's this you know, spider man meme. Right,
34:54
Speaker 1: everybody's pointing at the other as who to do this? Folks,
34:57
Speaker 1: This has been a collective disaster. Bill Clinton's presidency is
35:02
Speaker 1: the only one that did meaningful things. Here, my friend
35:06
Speaker 1: John Kasick, who's who's my interview today. Basically he and
35:10
Speaker 1: Bill Clinton, that's who gets credit for this. And when
35:13
Speaker 1: you realize the character of a guy like John Kasick
35:15
Speaker 1: and sort of how Trump, how Clinton politically used to
35:18
Speaker 1: see things, you know, these were two responsible stewards when
35:23
Speaker 1: it came to the economy and they understood that. Guess what,
35:28
Speaker 1: you may have certain ideological beliefs, but ultimately you've got
35:33
Speaker 1: to sort of work together in some of these things
35:34
Speaker 1: if you're going to pull it off. So when you
35:38
Speaker 1: hear this bullshit rhetoric, the right wants to say it's
35:40
Speaker 1: all spending. Well, if it was, then why they vote
35:42
Speaker 1: for the big beautiful bill. The left wants to pretend
35:44
Speaker 1: only taxes can raising taxes. Look, you're gonna have to
35:46
Speaker 1: do both. It's probably going to have to be you know,
35:49
Speaker 1: three percent spending cut, three percent tax hikes, you know,
35:52
Speaker 1: something like that. But it's going to be one to
35:54
Speaker 1: one folks. It's the only way to tame this. But
35:57
Speaker 1: at some point the markets are going to make us
35:58
Speaker 1: do it all right. Makers are never going to do
36:00
Speaker 1: it themselves, probably, and these two parties aren't ever going
36:03
Speaker 1: to take ownership of this. It's either going to take
36:05
Speaker 1: a third party, outside force or our economic crash for
36:09
Speaker 1: us to do this. But again that's for another monologue
36:12
Speaker 1: on another day. Speaking of numbers that people misuse, I
36:17
Speaker 1: want to transition to this fun little social media debate
36:20
Speaker 1: that's been taking place about polling and all these bad
36:23
Speaker 1: polls that suddenly got into circulation. But I kind of
36:25
Speaker 1: want to remind people of an old axiom that we
36:29
Speaker 1: operated at at the Hotline back in the nineties, that
36:31
Speaker 1: most pollsters operated about forever that suddenly people have forgotten,
36:36
Speaker 1: and that is, you don't poll in August. Frankly, you
36:41
Speaker 1: don't poll between the fourth of July and Labor Day.
36:44
Speaker 1: That was just it's a waste of money to poll
36:48
Speaker 1: between July fourth and Labor Day, particularly general election polling. Obviously,
36:54
Speaker 1: we have primaries now in July and August, and if
36:56
Speaker 1: you're trying to figure out the primary electorate for those
36:57
Speaker 1: specific things, that's one thing. But you cannot believe general
37:01
Speaker 1: election polling in July and August. It is a waste
37:03
Speaker 1: of time. And posters have known this for decades, all right,
37:08
Speaker 1: The polling industry understood it. August polling has never been
37:11
Speaker 1: particularly predictive. It doesn't mean every August poll is bad.
37:15
Speaker 1: It just means the electorate in August hasn't fully become
37:18
Speaker 1: the electorate we're going to see in November. People aren't
37:20
Speaker 1: fully paying attention yet. Yes, there are some states where
37:24
Speaker 1: schools starts super early now in August. Florida is one
37:26
Speaker 1: of those. There's a few states in the South that
37:28
Speaker 1: have done it. They sort of changed their calendar. Used
37:30
Speaker 1: to be we all started basically at Labor Day. That's
37:33
Speaker 1: all moved up because of standardized tests and the scheduling
37:36
Speaker 1: of the standardized test. But you know, here in Virginia,
37:40
Speaker 1: we still operate essentially as a labor day school starting state.
37:43
Speaker 1: It's called the Old King's Dominion Law is what people
37:46
Speaker 1: used to joke about it that somehow the folks that
37:49
Speaker 1: own King's Dominion had to strangle hold over the legislature
37:52
Speaker 1: never let schools start, you know, And then over time
37:55
Speaker 1: counties started getting waivers and schools. Various counties have creep
38:00
Speaker 1: up into August. But for the most part you still
38:02
Speaker 1: have people on vacation. Campaign advertising hasn't fully penetrated yet.
38:06
Speaker 1: Some voters barely know who the candidates are in August.
38:09
Speaker 1: Likely voter models are useless in August, very speculative, and
38:14
Speaker 1: historically the serious campaign's always understood this. August polling at
38:18
Speaker 1: best might be useful for establishing a baseline. Maybe maybe
38:22
Speaker 1: it helps you test a messager too, Maybe you can
38:24
Speaker 1: look for weaknesses, maybe you can figure out But it wasn't.
38:27
Speaker 1: Oh my god, somebody is up two point three points.
38:30
Speaker 1: Take that to the bank. But we now are seeing
38:33
Speaker 1: a lot of August polling. Not good polling, by the way,
38:35
Speaker 1: but we are seeing August polling. So what changed. Polling
38:38
Speaker 1: got cheaper, and what's changed, it's got much cheaper. We
38:43
Speaker 1: have tech based polling, online panels, automation, less live calling. Now, look,
38:48
Speaker 1: there were some benefits to that, some excellent posters are
38:51
Speaker 1: doing some innovative work with some of these tools, but
38:54
Speaker 1: cheaper polling also lowered the barrier to entry for polsters.
38:58
Speaker 1: We don't have the best status iss running these cheap poles,
39:01
Speaker 1: trust me. And when you lower the barrier to entry,
39:04
Speaker 1: you don't simply get more good poles. You get more poles,
39:07
Speaker 1: and you get a lot more crappy poles. And somewhere
39:10
Speaker 1: along the line we've confused more data with more information
39:15
Speaker 1: and those aren't necessarily the same thing. And those of
39:18
Speaker 1: you you know what's coming. Those of you who've followed
39:21
Speaker 1: me for years know my problem with indiscriminate polling averages.
39:25
Speaker 1: And I've always thought the decision to try to average
39:29
Speaker 1: poles and sort of diminish the polster themselves has actually cheapened, right,
39:36
Speaker 1: has flattened all of this. And so let me give
39:39
Speaker 1: you let me tell you why I don't believe in
39:41
Speaker 1: polling averages. Imagine you've got an incredible piece of filet
39:45
Speaker 1: mignon that you got at the butcher, and you've got
39:49
Speaker 1: a pile of dog shit, and you throw both of
39:52
Speaker 1: them into a blender. You have not improved the taste
39:58
Speaker 1: or the smell of the dog shit. That you have
40:00
Speaker 1: ruined the filet Mignon. Now everything tastes like shit. Well,
40:05
Speaker 1: that's my problem with averaging polling, simply because the poles
40:07
Speaker 1: exist and average doesn't purify bad data. It gives bad
40:12
Speaker 1: data legitimacy. And this becomes especially ridiculous in the state
40:16
Speaker 1: based races. Right presidential approval, Maybe the averaging over time
40:22
Speaker 1: works itself out and the bad data doesn't, and you
40:24
Speaker 1: might be able to at least get rid of the
40:27
Speaker 1: smell of the dog shit on the bad polls, right,
40:30
Speaker 1: because there's hundreds of polls measuring presidential job approval, and
40:36
Speaker 1: so maybe over a time you start to see the
40:39
Speaker 1: curve and it kind of works. This episode of the
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Speaker 1: one eight seven seven seven seven zero seven eight sixty
42:23
Speaker 1: seven if you're in Louisiana. But the Arkansas Senate race,
42:33
Speaker 1: how many quality independent polls are my friends who do
42:38
Speaker 1: the polling averages, and I'm I'm not going to single
42:40
Speaker 1: out you know who the you know who the two
42:41
Speaker 1: biggest entities are, and I don't because I like the
42:44
Speaker 1: guys behind them. I think they're smart guys, They're trying
42:47
Speaker 1: to do good things with them. They're just wrong about
42:50
Speaker 1: how they use this data. And I am I am
42:53
Speaker 1: the stubborn old guy yelling at Cloud about this, and
42:56
Speaker 1: I'm gonna can stay this and this is why some
42:59
Speaker 1: of you probably are here to get this sort of
43:02
Speaker 1: clearer perspective on how to use this data. But take
43:05
Speaker 1: the Arkansas center race. How many quality independent poles are
43:08
Speaker 1: We really talking about five at best throughout this cycle. Six?
43:11
Speaker 1: So imagine two of them are from the same polster,
43:14
Speaker 1: two are partisan, and one uses questionable methodology, and one
43:18
Speaker 1: is genuinely well done and excellent. You really want to
43:21
Speaker 1: throw all six in a blender. And suddenly somebody announces, Hey,
43:24
Speaker 1: the Arkansas polling average is Cotton forty seven point three
43:26
Speaker 1: in the Democrat forty four point two. No, that's not precision.
43:31
Speaker 1: That's false precision. By the way, anytime I see a
43:33
Speaker 1: decimal point in a poll, I automatically assume that polster's
43:38
Speaker 1: full of shit because you already have a margin of error.
43:42
Speaker 1: So there's no precision to the decimal point if you
43:46
Speaker 1: also include a margin of air. And never mind, don't
43:50
Speaker 1: get me started at margin of air. Most reporters don't
43:52
Speaker 1: know what it means. Many of them write that somehow
43:55
Speaker 1: there's an equal chance that the air rate applies across
43:58
Speaker 1: the board. It's not how margin of air work. It's
44:00
Speaker 1: a bell curve. If you don't know, go back to
44:04
Speaker 1: math class. There's a reason I used Arkansas as my example,
44:07
Speaker 1: by the way, because there's an Arkansas poll that's been
44:10
Speaker 1: circulating over last week that many of you have pointed
44:12
Speaker 1: out to me and been asking me about. So I thought, well,
44:15
Speaker 1: this is a nice time for me to go in
44:16
Speaker 1: a little bit of a rant about polling. But also
44:19
Speaker 1: I was intrigued about Arkansas. I'll get to in a minute.
44:22
Speaker 1: But it is a perfect example, this poll of what
44:24
Speaker 1: I'm talking about. The Hendrix College talk Business and Politics
44:27
Speaker 1: survey got everybody's attention because it showed Tom Cotton in
44:30
Speaker 1: much more trouble than anybody expected. And basically I dismissed
44:34
Speaker 1: the top line not because I know the result is wrong.
44:37
Speaker 1: I don't it might be right. I dismissed it because
44:39
Speaker 1: I don't trust the methodology enough to let this particular
44:42
Speaker 1: poll change my overall assessment of Arkansas as or red state,
44:45
Speaker 1: or this race specifically, because it was an entirely a
44:49
Speaker 1: tech spased survey. They only used one mode, and at
44:52
Speaker 1: this point there is no one mode that's usable anymore.
44:55
Speaker 1: You've got to have multiple mode modes to make sure
44:58
Speaker 1: you truly have a represent naive sample of people to
45:01
Speaker 1: talk to so that you don't get stuck over waiting polls. Now,
45:06
Speaker 1: this one was a text only survey, and these can
45:09
Speaker 1: have a real problem. A lot of these progressive polling firms,
45:13
Speaker 1: I think, intentionally only do text only polling because they
45:18
Speaker 1: know it will always over index on younger voters, and
45:21
Speaker 1: it will always create a larger perception of a likely
45:25
Speaker 1: voter electorate that somehow is younger than it actually will be.
45:30
Speaker 1: And that's what these text based poles end up doing
45:32
Speaker 1: and then you under index the more reliable voters that
45:36
Speaker 1: normally you know, particularly older voters, and you're just waiting
45:40
Speaker 1: an enormous amount. Now, it doesn't mean I think the
45:43
Speaker 1: polster cheated the on how they got their numbers. I
45:48
Speaker 1: just think they made a mistake only using one mode
45:51
Speaker 1: to their methodology. I'm not saying the numbers are made up.
45:54
Speaker 1: I'm not leveling that charge. But it doesn't mean the
45:58
Speaker 1: poll can and it doesn't mean the pole can't accidentally
46:00
Speaker 1: be accurate, and a pole can use legitimate statistical techniques
46:05
Speaker 1: and still have a what I would call a mode problem.
46:09
Speaker 1: And what worries me is when somebody takes that result,
46:12
Speaker 1: tosses it into an average, and suddenly the average gives
46:15
Speaker 1: the result more credibility simply because it's now sitting next
46:18
Speaker 1: to several other numbers. And that's exactly backward. So anyway,
46:23
Speaker 1: just particularly don't pay attention to a single average of
46:27
Speaker 1: any state based poll. I'm sorry, Just don't. There are
46:31
Speaker 1: good polls out there. If you want to know which
46:33
Speaker 1: ones they are, I'm happy to point them out. I
46:35
Speaker 1: can always tell you this. Give me a good arp pole,
46:38
Speaker 1: I'm going to be happy. Different states have a few
46:40
Speaker 1: polsters that are pretty good, But even then, pay more
46:43
Speaker 1: attention to trend lines and direction between two dip poles
46:48
Speaker 1: done by the same polster rather than the hard numbers themselves.
46:51
Speaker 1: So that's my polling tip for the day. Now, let
46:56
Speaker 1: me spend a few minutes on Arkansas. Here a minute. Now,
46:58
Speaker 1: here's the other half of the story. I don't want
47:00
Speaker 1: to make the opposite mistake either, because while I don't
47:02
Speaker 1: buy the poll, I'm intrigued by the possibility that Tom
47:07
Speaker 1: Cotton may be more vulnerable than we're paying attention to.
47:09
Speaker 1: First of all, it's a huge ag state, and we've
47:12
Speaker 1: already shown right the farmers. Nobody has been harder on
47:17
Speaker 1: farmers of a president in my lifetime, I think than
47:19
Speaker 1: Donald Trump, even as he says he wants to be
47:21
Speaker 1: the best friend of farmers and this is an important
47:24
Speaker 1: constituency group for him, and he has screwed them left
47:27
Speaker 1: and right, particularly on immigration and trade. But there's another
47:32
Speaker 1: issue that I'm curious about, and if this is impacting
47:34
Speaker 1: Cotton more than I think. Cotton is an old fashioned
47:38
Speaker 1: Republican haulk man. He is a neo conservative if you
47:41
Speaker 1: want to label him as that, He's much more John
47:43
Speaker 1: Bolton than he is JD. Vance. He's much more Rubio
47:46
Speaker 1: than the Vance wing of the Republican Party. By the way,
47:49
Speaker 1: APB for Marco Rubien on the Iran War, it is
47:51
Speaker 1: astonishing to me how much distance he has gotten himself
47:54
Speaker 1: from this war. The secon day state somehow is not
47:57
Speaker 1: involved in the day to day mess that is around
47:59
Speaker 1: but us. Tom Cotton has been a huge champion of
48:04
Speaker 1: not just this Iran war, but if the idea of
48:06
Speaker 1: going to war with Iran right, and he's this is
48:11
Speaker 1: not a popular war, and it never really was. Now
48:14
Speaker 1: he knows it isn't popular, and he may end up
48:17
Speaker 1: describing the problem with this Iran war as execution rather
48:19
Speaker 1: than policy, because crossing Trump is a different political decision, right,
48:24
Speaker 1: He can't do that in Arkansas. Trump probably has more
48:27
Speaker 1: personal loyalty to him in Arkansas than Cotton does. The
48:31
Speaker 1: problems sitting there for him, and like I said, throwing
48:33
Speaker 1: the ag issues, you know, throwing the trade problems. Trump's
48:39
Speaker 1: trade agenda has been brutal some of the very constituencies
48:42
Speaker 1: that Cotton depends on. So I'm not here telling you
48:45
Speaker 1: Tom Cotton is going to lose the Arkansas Center race.
48:47
Speaker 1: That's not going to happen. I'm not even telling you
48:49
Speaker 1: he's seriously endangered at the moment. But I am a
48:52
Speaker 1: little more curious about his margin than I was six
48:54
Speaker 1: months ago, because if Tom Cotton only wins by eight
48:58
Speaker 1: maybe nine to election nine, everybody looks at Arkansas, whoa
49:02
Speaker 1: wait a minute, Tom Cotton won by what that'll tell
49:06
Speaker 1: us something Arkansas's early poll closing state. By the way,
49:10
Speaker 1: if he's in single digits, Katie barrowed the door of
49:14
Speaker 1: what's happening in Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, Montana, as we
49:18
Speaker 1: move across the country anyway, could tell us something about
49:22
Speaker 1: the Republican coalition that matters well beyond the state of Arkansas.
49:26
Speaker 1: So what I don't want to do is use one
49:28
Speaker 1: questionable methodology from a August Pole as proof of anything
49:32
Speaker 1: that's happening. You're going to want a real poll, a
49:34
Speaker 1: good one, all right, And if that pole starts to
49:39
Speaker 1: tell me Cotton is underperforming, you'll have my attention, maybe
49:43
Speaker 1: with both my eyes instead of just one eye. Until then,
49:47
Speaker 1: I am intrigued by the dynamics of this race, but
49:50
Speaker 1: I'm not necessarily I will say this. The pole forced
49:53
Speaker 1: me to think about this race a little bit, and
49:55
Speaker 1: I dove into it a little bit, and you're like, hmm,
49:57
Speaker 1: the contours here are intriguing. Anyway, Speaking of hidden information
50:04
Speaker 1: inside election results, Michael McDonald from the University of Florida
50:07
Speaker 1: had an interesting analysis of the Florida Republican primary. Those
50:10
Speaker 1: of you who don't know Michael McDonald, he's basically the
50:13
Speaker 1: best guru of sort of analyzing turnout in the country,
50:17
Speaker 1: understanding raw voter turnout, sort of in the nonpartisan space.
50:22
Speaker 1: And I know you're thinking, I can't believe Chuck's praising
50:24
Speaker 1: the University of Florida. Well, school's good. Just there thought
50:27
Speaker 1: program sucks, you know that, But I tease Anyway, McDonald
50:31
Speaker 1: looked at the Byron Donald's primary performance and he noted
50:36
Speaker 1: that he thought he saw some red flags for the
50:38
Speaker 1: general election. And there are red flags that I told
50:41
Speaker 1: you about earlier. And he found these red flags specifically
50:46
Speaker 1: in the data that there is a larger Republican resistance
50:50
Speaker 1: to Donald's than folks may realize, and it is not
50:54
Speaker 1: evenly distributed throughout the state. Some of Donald's weakest performances
50:58
Speaker 1: came guests north of Orlando. Folks in north Florida in
51:03
Speaker 1: the rural, culturally more deep South counties. It's been a
51:07
Speaker 1: question many of us have had and an African American
51:10
Speaker 1: Republican succeed in the South. We are testing that premise
51:14
Speaker 1: with Byron Donald's in places like Dixie and Lafayette Counties
51:18
Speaker 1: in the northern part of the state. Donalds actually finished
51:21
Speaker 1: third in the Republican primary. And what I found particularly
51:24
Speaker 1: interesting was McDonald's analysis of the turnout. Get this, in
51:29
Speaker 1: some of the places with the highest Republican turnout, the
51:33
Speaker 1: counties that reported were in the higher end of turnout.
51:36
Speaker 1: By county, Donald's did worse. So think about that distinction.
51:41
Speaker 1: These weren't simply Republicans who didn't like Donald's in state home.
51:46
Speaker 1: Some of them appeared motivated enough to turn out to
51:48
Speaker 1: vote for somebody else, even though they knew he was
51:50
Speaker 1: probably not going to win, that somebody else wasn't gonna win.
51:54
Speaker 1: So if Donald's has a vulnerability, I don't think it's
51:56
Speaker 1: a huge number of Republicans crossing over to vote for
51:59
Speaker 1: David Jolly, the former Republican. What donald has to worry
52:02
Speaker 1: about it is the undervote, Republican underperformance going eh, forget it.
52:09
Speaker 1: I'm going to stay home, not as something that makes
52:15
Speaker 1: me considerably or angrier as a man, as both a
52:18
Speaker 1: journalists and as an American. Stars and Stripes what the
52:21
Speaker 1: Pentagon is doing, because the fight over the USS Abraham
52:24
Speaker 1: Lincoln has turned into something more important than one difficult deployment.
52:28
Speaker 1: It's become a credibility problem for the entire US military.
52:32
Speaker 1: Stars and Stripes reported what sailors were experiencing. That's what
52:35
Speaker 1: they do, That's what they've done for decades. It's been
52:38
Speaker 1: an extraordinary long deployment. Thankfully they're on their way home.
52:41
Speaker 1: There have been mental health problems, food issues, supply issues,
52:44
Speaker 1: communications issues. It's been enormous strain on sailors and their families.
52:49
Speaker 1: And instead of asking why did this happen, the political
52:51
Speaker 1: leadership at the Pentagon appears obsessed with attacking the people
52:54
Speaker 1: reporting that had happened. Let's remember why Stars and Stripes exist.
52:59
Speaker 1: It exists for a reason the military and learned generations
53:01
Speaker 1: ago that troops need access to reporting that isn't simply
53:04
Speaker 1: here's what command wants you to know today. Eisenhower understood it.
53:09
Speaker 1: Independent reporting inside the military is not disloyalty. It's one
53:14
Speaker 1: of the protections against bullshit flowing up and down the
53:17
Speaker 1: chain of command. And if Pete Hegseth and the circle
53:21
Speaker 1: around him regard accurate reporting about sailor's conditions as an
53:25
Speaker 1: attack on the Secretary Jesus, that's disturbing. And look, I've
53:30
Speaker 1: outlined so many ways that Pete Haggseth is one of
53:33
Speaker 1: just a serious problem for the US military. Everything people
53:38
Speaker 1: worried about that might happen if heg Seth were put
53:40
Speaker 1: in charge appears to be happening. A fixation on his
53:43
Speaker 1: own personal image, a political communications operation that's built apparently
53:47
Speaker 1: to start running for president, rather than actually worrying about
53:50
Speaker 1: the troops, punishing dissent, punishing the reporting of bad news.
53:55
Speaker 1: Pentagon increasingly organized around protecting whatever legitimacy hag Seth thinks
54:00
Speaker 1: he has. And when somebody isn't confident enough in their
54:03
Speaker 1: own performance, one of the temptations is to blame everybody
54:07
Speaker 1: reporting on that performance. So apparently stars and stripes now
54:11
Speaker 1: is the problem. Not the sailors aren't the problem, The
54:14
Speaker 1: deployment isn't the problem. The reporting is the problem. Man.
54:18
Speaker 1: That is upside down. And here's where this connects to
54:20
Speaker 1: something I talked about last week. We now have two
54:23
Speaker 1: enormous institutions of the federal government where I personally do
54:27
Speaker 1: not automatically trust the political leadership's public version of events
54:30
Speaker 1: on anything they say. One is the Justice Department and
54:33
Speaker 1: the others the Defensive Department. I know I'm not alone here.
54:36
Speaker 1: This is not a partisan statement. This has unfortunately earned
54:40
Speaker 1: lack of credibility. You know, I'm not a big alarmist.
54:43
Speaker 1: I'm not one of these that just tries to write
54:45
Speaker 1: an algorithm just to play caate an audience. You know.
54:48
Speaker 1: That's for these other sort of partisan publications, and you know,
54:52
Speaker 1: you know, the touches and the bros and all of
54:56
Speaker 1: that bullshit. But in these two instances, there are thousands
55:01
Speaker 1: of serious career people inside both of these departments, and
55:05
Speaker 1: I continue to believe they'll will be there when the
55:07
Speaker 1: country needs them. I do. But the institutional credibility, man,
55:13
Speaker 1: it's going to take us decades to rebuild it. And
55:15
Speaker 1: political leadership, boy, they've burned it down really fast. When
55:18
Speaker 1: the chips are down, Americans need to believe what the
55:21
Speaker 1: Pentagon has to say. Americans need to believe what the
55:24
Speaker 1: Justice Department has to say. You cannot spend years teaching
55:28
Speaker 1: the public that every official statement is a political messaging,
55:31
Speaker 1: and then suddenly announce, oh, okay, this time, you've got
55:34
Speaker 1: to believe us. Where the hell is congress, man, This
55:37
Speaker 1: is where Congress just this is why Republicans are probably
55:41
Speaker 1: going to lose both the House and the Senate, is
55:42
Speaker 1: that there's plenty of independence going You guys suck at this.
55:46
Speaker 1: I don't know if the Democrats already better, but we
55:48
Speaker 1: know you suck at this and we need some check
55:50
Speaker 1: on this nonsense. But Jesus, come on, let's get some real.
55:57
Speaker 1: I mean, think about all the crap at the Pentagon
56:00
Speaker 1: between the Lincoln, the mental health problems, terrible war planning,
56:04
Speaker 1: ammunition shortage, who the hell is managing this place, the
56:09
Speaker 1: legal justification for these boat attacks they likely are all
56:12
Speaker 1: on constitutional Congressional oversight is supposed to tackle that all right, now,
56:21
Speaker 1: let me hit data centers. As I told you, man,
56:24
Speaker 1: there's a lot happening this weekend, and I felt like
56:26
Speaker 1: I needed to touch a little bit of all of them.
56:28
Speaker 1: I want to welcome the rest of the political world
56:30
Speaker 1: for discovering this story. We hear at the Chuck Podcast
56:32
Speaker 1: and those of you that are subscribers to newsphere. We've
56:35
Speaker 1: been on this for weeks, if not months, because those
56:39
Speaker 1: of you who have been listening here, No, we've been
56:40
Speaker 1: talking about this a while. But I don't want to
56:44
Speaker 1: overlook this fascinating memo that the National Republican Senatorial Committee
56:48
Speaker 1: put out late last week. They put it a memo
56:51
Speaker 1: blaring memo to quote unquote interested parties, and they might
56:53
Speaker 1: as well have just put an SOS message. Help let
56:57
Speaker 1: me read you this one chariot said this about data
56:59
Speaker 1: center from the NRSSE to quote interested partings, and they
57:03
Speaker 1: were focused specifically in the Ohio Center. Race campaigns or
57:06
Speaker 1: party committees cannot fix the toxic brand of an entire
57:09
Speaker 1: segment of the economy. That's the words of the NRSC,
57:13
Speaker 1: Tim Scott's organization, that's the Senate Republican Campaign arm telling
57:17
Speaker 1: the tech industry, guys, you've got a major political problem.
57:21
Speaker 1: We're not going to be able to fix it for you.
57:23
Speaker 1: And what's fascinating about the NRC's own testing is that
57:26
Speaker 1: the strongest Republican argument is not build them everywhere. It's
57:30
Speaker 1: let communities decide, make the data centers pay for their
57:33
Speaker 1: own power, their own water, their own infrastructure. Now you
57:38
Speaker 1: contrast that with somebody who wants to stop data center
57:40
Speaker 1: construction completely and say America will lose the II race
57:43
Speaker 1: to China. Think about what that tells you. The Republican
57:47
Speaker 1: message itself starts from the premise that voters distrust the industry.
57:51
Speaker 1: They know this, and this is what I've been telling you.
57:53
Speaker 1: This is bigger. This is not about data centers. This
57:55
Speaker 1: is backlash to all of tech. Okay, this is the
57:59
Speaker 1: beginning of an entire political backlash against tech and AI,
58:03
Speaker 1: big money, skepticism, the electricity bills, the water, the land,
58:06
Speaker 1: all of it. Who's benefiting? Who pays? Why should my
58:09
Speaker 1: community want this? Why am I once again enhancing the
58:13
Speaker 1: portfolio value of Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. Look, the
58:17
Speaker 1: tech industry, as I said before, spent enormous amounts of
58:20
Speaker 1: time and money capturing Washington. It's considerably less time winning
58:25
Speaker 1: over the public and let's and it's now discovering that
58:28
Speaker 1: Washington can't give you permission to build something if every
58:31
Speaker 1: local community hates it. It's still interesting to me that
58:35
Speaker 1: apparently the only tech CEO that gets it is Mark Zuckerberg.
58:40
Speaker 1: You know, I know sit with that a minute, right,
58:42
Speaker 1: But he understands that the public buying is going to matter,
58:47
Speaker 1: and the fact that he understands this and the NRC
58:51
Speaker 1: is now. But what's interesting to me is that basically saying, hey,
58:55
Speaker 1: and they're begging industry to step in here because they're saying, hey, look,
58:59
Speaker 1: we're we're all going to be against you, but the
59:01
Speaker 1: Democrats gonna be harder against you. You know, we'll be
59:04
Speaker 1: better against you if you rescue our majority. Now, I mean,
59:08
Speaker 1: that's what the memo said between the lines, but it
59:12
Speaker 1: was begging for the industry itself to step in because
59:15
Speaker 1: they're basically saying, we can't if you, We're going to
59:18
Speaker 1: lose Ohio over data centers, pure and simple staying in
59:23
Speaker 1: the Midwest. Another Michigan story worth watching. Mike Rodgers an Apack,
59:27
Speaker 1: I just thought i'd give you a few seconds on
59:28
Speaker 1: this fascinating thing. Isn't merely that Rogers apparently doesn't want
59:31
Speaker 1: a pack publicly involved. It's that we know he doesn't
59:35
Speaker 1: want APEC publicly involved. Who wanted that fact out presumably
59:42
Speaker 1: not a pack, So it sure looks like somebody around
59:44
Speaker 1: Rogers wanted Michigan voters to know, Hey, we're keeping our
59:47
Speaker 1: distance from APAC. Now you gotta ask yourself, why are
59:50
Speaker 1: you doing that? APEX spent an enormous money trying to
59:53
Speaker 1: defeat up Do LSIED and the Democratic primary, and they failed.
59:57
Speaker 1: And lsi Ed used the outside spending itself as part
59:59
Speaker 1: of his argument. And here's where I'm not sure Rogers
1:00:02
Speaker 1: gets the benefit he thinks he's going to get from this,
1:00:05
Speaker 1: because Al say Ed's argument has been outside interests shouldn't
1:00:09
Speaker 1: purchase Michigan politics, and Rogers' allies essentially say this particular
1:00:13
Speaker 1: outside organization is politically problematic enough that we don't want
1:00:17
Speaker 1: it's help advertised. Isn't Rogers now reinforcing El Saya's point. Now,
1:00:25
Speaker 1: I'll say this, I think Apak has a much larger
1:00:28
Speaker 1: strategic problem here. Supporting Israel cannot require supporting every policy
1:00:32
Speaker 1: of every Israeli government, and Apak has to figure out
1:00:35
Speaker 1: how to give some space to people that would like
1:00:39
Speaker 1: to support Israel's right to exist. There are large numbers
1:00:45
Speaker 1: of American Jews who strongly support Israel and strongly oppose
1:00:48
Speaker 1: net Yahoo strongly oppose his settlement policy. By the way,
1:00:53
Speaker 1: there are large numbers of Israelis who oppose bb the
1:00:57
Speaker 1: settlement policy. In particular, has done enormous damage to Israel,
1:01:00
Speaker 1: standing enormous damage. And if APAC allows itself to become
1:01:05
Speaker 1: identified more with BB and that wing of thinking inside
1:01:09
Speaker 1: of Israel rather than Israel as a whole, it's going
1:01:13
Speaker 1: to make its own coalition smaller. And that is a
1:01:16
Speaker 1: strategic problem they need to come to grips with. They
1:01:20
Speaker 1: have got to figure out how to how to have
1:01:23
Speaker 1: some space here. Maybe this maybe the problem they've got
1:01:26
Speaker 1: is too many donors. Maybe they have some donors that
1:01:30
Speaker 1: are pretty pro BB, but this absoluteness they've got to
1:01:33
Speaker 1: allow for a middle ground or they're going to lose.
1:01:36
Speaker 1: And Mike Rogers walking away is to me afraid you're
1:01:41
Speaker 1: going to hear a lot of Canary and the ConA.
1:01:53
Speaker 1: All right, finally, let me close with the Akeem Jeffreys
1:01:55
Speaker 1: Kushner's story, if you will. That sort of blew up
1:02:00
Speaker 1: the Sunday New York Times that Jeffries has meant privately
1:02:03
Speaker 1: with Jared Kushner, and apparently they're been maintaining a relationship
1:02:06
Speaker 1: that goes back to the criminal Justice Bill that they
1:02:09
Speaker 1: worked on together during Trump's first term, and according to
1:02:12
Speaker 1: the Times, they discussed housing, immigration affordability, and then Kushner
1:02:16
Speaker 1: apparently suggested that Jeffries talk with Chief of Staff Susie Wiles. Now, predictably,
1:02:20
Speaker 1: everybody online hates this, right, the online left, Why the
1:02:22
Speaker 1: hell's ak Qeen Jeffers secretly meeting with Jared Kushner? The
1:02:25
Speaker 1: online right? Why the hell is Jared Kushner secretly meeting
1:02:27
Speaker 1: with Akim Jeffries? Right, everybody gets their own betrayal narrative
1:02:31
Speaker 1: on this one. But here's what I think this story
1:02:32
Speaker 1: actually means. The White House is preparing for Speaker Jeffries,
1:02:37
Speaker 1: pure and symbol right, This is the Trump White House
1:02:40
Speaker 1: admitting that they can read a poll and Jeffries can
1:02:44
Speaker 1: count seat. So if Democrats take the House, something happens
1:02:46
Speaker 1: that the political basis on both sides often hate to
1:02:48
Speaker 1: acknowledge government stillless to function. Now, Jeffries is going to
1:02:52
Speaker 1: be in an almost impossible position if he's speaker in
1:02:55
Speaker 1: twenty twenty seven. Is Democratic base is going to want confrontation,
1:02:58
Speaker 1: aggressive oversights, investigations, maybe even impeachment. They're going to want
1:03:02
Speaker 1: the Democratic House to be the check on Trump, and
1:03:06
Speaker 1: especially if the Democrats don't win the Senate, and then
1:03:09
Speaker 1: if the House is the only bulwark that exists, puts
1:03:12
Speaker 1: even more pressure on jeffreyes right now. The only reason
1:03:15
Speaker 1: Jeffries isn't hated by the rank and file right now
1:03:19
Speaker 1: is because he gets to stand next to Juck Schumer,
1:03:21
Speaker 1: who takes all the arrows. But remember, Jeffries will simultaneously
1:03:27
Speaker 1: have to keep the government open, deal with the debt ceiling,
1:03:29
Speaker 1: respond to disasters, potentially negotiate on immigration, potentially negotiate on housing,
1:03:34
Speaker 1: past defense funding, do all of the boring governing that
1:03:37
Speaker 1: doesn't stop simply because everybody hates each other. Trump also
1:03:41
Speaker 1: understands the Trump. Every time Jeffries compromises, Trump's gets to say, see,
1:03:44
Speaker 1: even a chem agrees with me. And every time Jeffres compromises,
1:03:47
Speaker 1: somebody in the Democratic left gets to say, sell out.
1:03:50
Speaker 1: It's a box. And it's fascinating that Kushner apparently recognizes it.
1:03:53
Speaker 1: According to The Times, Kushner has told people Jeffries is
1:03:56
Speaker 1: the most serious person among Democratic leaders to something bipartisan
1:03:59
Speaker 1: actually had to get done. Okay, Susie Wallasey is a
1:04:03
Speaker 1: pretty serious counterpart inside the White House. And here's where
1:04:06
Speaker 1: I may annoy everybody here. They should be talking you
1:04:09
Speaker 1: don't have to like Kushner, and you don't have to
1:04:10
Speaker 1: like Jeffries. You don't have to trust the either party.
1:04:13
Speaker 1: But guess what it'd be malpracticed if there was no
1:04:17
Speaker 1: backchannel between these two. The disturbing thing isn't what they're
1:04:21
Speaker 1: they're speaking privately. The disturbing thing would be if our
1:04:23
Speaker 1: politics becomes so tribal that private communication itself is considered betrayal.
1:04:28
Speaker 1: Because if Democrats win the House, Jeffries is going to
1:04:31
Speaker 1: have to confront the fundamental tension of governing in the
1:04:33
Speaker 1: Trump era. How do you resist a president when you
1:04:36
Speaker 1: believe he is abusing his power while simultaneously governing with
1:04:40
Speaker 1: that same president when the constitution requires you. It's going
1:04:44
Speaker 1: to be the defining question of Hakim Jeffreys speakership. All right,
1:04:50
Speaker 1: there's my political notebook. Now I want to spend my
1:04:52
Speaker 1: last ten minutes on a little bit of a coda here.
1:04:55
Speaker 1: I've been trying to play assignment editor to the Mark
1:04:57
Speaker 1: Walters story, and the point is this, when I left
1:05:05
Speaker 1: you in this two part episode of that, I left
1:05:09
Speaker 1: you with a question, is Mark Walter an outlier or
1:05:12
Speaker 1: see the canary in the coal mine. Well, I've been
1:05:15
Speaker 1: digging in some more on this whole connection between life
1:05:18
Speaker 1: insurance companies, private credit and whether this has the chance
1:05:22
Speaker 1: of becoming our next economic crisis. Well, we do know this.
1:05:26
Speaker 1: This is not Mark Walter is not an outlier. This
1:05:29
Speaker 1: thing is bigger than him. And I want to remind
1:05:32
Speaker 1: you what the story is about. After the two thousand
1:05:34
Speaker 1: and eight crash, we did something that made a ton
1:05:36
Speaker 1: of sense. We cracked down on banks. Higher capital requirements,
1:05:41
Speaker 1: stress tests, federal bear examiners, made it harder and more
1:05:43
Speaker 1: expensive for banks to make risky loans. And it worked.
1:05:47
Speaker 1: Banks got safer, But the borrows never disappeared. The lending
1:05:51
Speaker 1: just moved. It moved out of banks where we could
1:05:54
Speaker 1: see it and into a business called private credit, a
1:05:57
Speaker 1: fancy term for a simple thing lending money to companies
1:06:00
Speaker 1: outside the banking system. Here's how much of it moved.
1:06:03
Speaker 1: In two thousand, private credit in this country was about
1:06:06
Speaker 1: forty six billion dollars, which was a rounding error. Today
1:06:10
Speaker 1: it's somewhere north of a trillion and a half. You know,
1:06:13
Speaker 1: trillion dollars is actually a lot of money now. And
1:06:16
Speaker 1: to give you a sense of scale, the European Central
1:06:18
Speaker 1: Bank ran the comparison, US private credit at the end
1:06:21
Speaker 1: of twenty twenty four was roughly one point four trillion dollars.
1:06:26
Speaker 1: Guess how much the subprime mortgage market was in two
1:06:28
Speaker 1: thousand and six, just before the crash one point five trillion,
1:06:32
Speaker 1: So in raw dollars, they're about the same size. Now,
1:06:36
Speaker 1: I'll be fair, because the economy is much bigger now,
1:06:39
Speaker 1: so we're talking raw dollars. So it's sub primate. Twoh
1:06:42
Speaker 1: six was nearly twice as large a share of the
1:06:46
Speaker 1: economy as private credit is today. And these are different
1:06:50
Speaker 1: products with different plumbing, so it's not two thousand and
1:06:54
Speaker 1: seven yet with a new hat. But that money has
1:06:57
Speaker 1: to come from somewhere, and it turns out an enormous
1:06:59
Speaker 1: amount of it is coming from your life insurance policy.
1:07:01
Speaker 1: That's the bigger story here, and this is where I
1:07:04
Speaker 1: think more of the financial press, and frankly the mainstream
1:07:07
Speaker 1: press speaking American needs to cover this part of the story.
1:07:11
Speaker 1: Life insurance companies have quietly become the new banks for
1:07:15
Speaker 1: the super wealthy and private equity for this other economy
1:07:20
Speaker 1: that none of us really gave a lot of access to.
1:07:23
Speaker 1: Let me make this contra pret If you're sixty years old.
1:07:26
Speaker 1: You've saved some money. You put one hundred thousand dollars
1:07:29
Speaker 1: into an annuity. You're making a trade. You give an
1:07:32
Speaker 1: insurance company your money today. They promised to pay you later.
1:07:36
Speaker 1: Now what happens to your one hundred thousand dollars while
1:07:39
Speaker 1: they have it? Well, they don't put in a vault.
1:07:41
Speaker 1: They invested. And there are seven over seven hundred life
1:07:45
Speaker 1: insurance companies in America. Now they don't all work the
1:07:47
Speaker 1: same way. If you buy from New York Life, you're
1:07:51
Speaker 1: dealing with a mutual company. It's owned by the policyholders.
1:07:55
Speaker 1: There's no billionaire above it, no buyout firm above it,
1:07:59
Speaker 1: no shareholders demanding a number every three months to see
1:08:02
Speaker 1: if you're performing. When it invests well, that strengthens the
1:08:06
Speaker 1: company and pays claims. Right. It is the purest form
1:08:09
Speaker 1: of a life insurance company. Congratulations in New York Life.
1:08:12
Speaker 1: There's your advertisement from me on this one. Now walk
1:08:14
Speaker 1: down the street and buy the same annuity from a Theme.
1:08:17
Speaker 1: A Theme is also an insurance company. A theene is
1:08:20
Speaker 1: also owned by Apollo, one of the biggest private equity
1:08:24
Speaker 1: firms in the world. A Theme takes you one hundred
1:08:26
Speaker 1: thousand dollars and promises to pay you later as well.
1:08:29
Speaker 1: Apollo gets to manage the money, so your premium isn't
1:08:33
Speaker 1: just money an insurance company invests. It's fuel for an
1:08:37
Speaker 1: entire investment portfolio. Apollo gets a giant pool of cash
1:08:40
Speaker 1: to put to work. It can make private loans with it,
1:08:43
Speaker 1: It collects fees for managing it. And before you ask, no,
1:08:47
Speaker 1: none of this is illegal. There are perfectly good reasons
1:08:50
Speaker 1: to do it. But you should want to know why
1:08:52
Speaker 1: an investment firm wanted an insurance company in the first place.
1:08:56
Speaker 1: The answer is the most important thing I'm going to
1:08:58
Speaker 1: tell you today. Think about the differ between a bank
1:09:00
Speaker 1: and a life insurance company. You can walk into a
1:09:03
Speaker 1: bank tomorrow and take all of your money out no penalties.
1:09:07
Speaker 1: You can't do that with a thirty year life insurance policy.
1:09:10
Speaker 1: If you try to pull that money out early, there's
1:09:13
Speaker 1: a penalty, right, and they design that penalty to stop
1:09:17
Speaker 1: you from doing that. That's the whole game. Banks hold
1:09:20
Speaker 1: money that can run if you will. Life insurers hold
1:09:24
Speaker 1: money that cannot go away. And money that can't run
1:09:29
Speaker 1: is the most valuable raw material in finance, because if
1:09:34
Speaker 1: you don't owe your money for you don't owe the
1:09:37
Speaker 1: person your money for twenty years. I don't have to
1:09:39
Speaker 1: buy things I can sell tomorrow. I can make loans
1:09:42
Speaker 1: that don't trade. I can may own things nobody prices
1:09:45
Speaker 1: every day, and things that are hard to sell have
1:09:49
Speaker 1: to pay more to get you to hold them. It's
1:09:52
Speaker 1: more return, more risk. Potentially, a thirty year promise arguably
1:09:57
Speaker 1: should be backed by long term investments a scam. But
1:10:01
Speaker 1: here's the question I can't answer, and I want to
1:10:03
Speaker 1: be honest that I can't answer. When Apollo makes a
1:10:05
Speaker 1: loan using Athen's money, who's that loan for. Is it
1:10:09
Speaker 1: there because it's the best safest investment to make sure
1:10:13
Speaker 1: the seventy eight year old and Toledo gets her check
1:10:15
Speaker 1: in twenty forty one, or is it there because it's
1:10:18
Speaker 1: a deal Apollo wanted to get done, and maybe they're
1:10:21
Speaker 1: more worried about the financing of said company than they
1:10:26
Speaker 1: are paying that annuity. Some Usually they're pointing, you know,
1:10:33
Speaker 1: the incentives are aligned, but at some point they may
1:10:36
Speaker 1: not be. Someday there's a deal that's good for the
1:10:39
Speaker 1: investment firm and just not so good for the policyholder.
1:10:43
Speaker 1: Someday there's a loan that needs to be refinanced to
1:10:45
Speaker 1: protect a bigger relationship, and on that day, whose interest
1:10:49
Speaker 1: comes first? So this is much bigger than Mark Walter.
1:10:52
Speaker 1: As you can see every This is every firm now
1:10:56
Speaker 1: and the honest answer is from the outside, we just
1:10:58
Speaker 1: don't see it. And this isn't just Apollo. KKR owns
1:11:01
Speaker 1: Global Atlantic. They have three and a half million policy holders,
1:11:05
Speaker 1: same architecture, customer provides this cash. Insurance company makes the promise,
1:11:10
Speaker 1: investment firm managed the pile and charges for it. So
1:11:13
Speaker 1: how big has this gotten? State regulators have identified one
1:11:17
Speaker 1: hundred and thirty seven out of my seven hundred insurance
1:11:19
Speaker 1: companies I told you about, of all types that are
1:11:21
Speaker 1: owned by private equities, and ninety six percent of the
1:11:26
Speaker 1: amount of money that these companies hold was inside of
1:11:29
Speaker 1: life insurance companies. Ninety six percent. It is all life insurance, folks,
1:11:36
Speaker 1: all of it. American life insures now hold nearly nine
1:11:40
Speaker 1: hundred billion dollars in private credit debt. Roughly fourteen percent
1:11:45
Speaker 1: of everything on their books is in these life insurance companies. Okay,
1:11:51
Speaker 1: now that brings me back to Mark Walter. Inside his world,
1:11:53
Speaker 1: his two insurers, Delaware Life and Clearspring held billions in
1:11:57
Speaker 1: these private investments, many of them, and we're connected to
1:12:00
Speaker 1: companies that Walter and Walter's own empire, all those LLCs
1:12:04
Speaker 1: of the Dodgers, etc. And then he lied to the regulators.
1:12:09
Speaker 1: He claimed it was unaffiliated because of these days he
1:12:11
Speaker 1: had ll seed everything and it looked like those unaffiliated
1:12:15
Speaker 1: Oh well, then this a penis came and people figured
1:12:17
Speaker 1: this out. But the point is Walter's not an outlier here.
1:12:21
Speaker 1: He didn't invent this machine. He was simply running an
1:12:24
Speaker 1: ordinary machine that everybody in private equity runs. Now, he
1:12:29
Speaker 1: may have pushed it further than others, and that's what
1:12:32
Speaker 1: we're investigators are going to try to figure out. But
1:12:34
Speaker 1: this is a This is a feature of this machine,
1:12:38
Speaker 1: not the bug. And so what happens when none of
1:12:41
Speaker 1: these companies fails. It's not what you think. Insurance companies
1:12:44
Speaker 1: don't go to federal bankruptcy court. They're carved out. Insurance
1:12:48
Speaker 1: commissioner of the company's home state goes to a state
1:12:51
Speaker 1: judge takes control. And here's what this means for you.
1:12:55
Speaker 1: The regulator can freeze your money withdrawals completely stopped. Now
1:13:01
Speaker 1: you get told your money is safe and simultaneously you're
1:13:04
Speaker 1: told you can't have It doesn't work like the FDIC does,
1:13:08
Speaker 1: where you're guaranteed on your deposits. So if you're living
1:13:11
Speaker 1: on that annuity, wooh, that's a problem. And if the
1:13:16
Speaker 1: company can't get saved and it gets liquidated, there is
1:13:19
Speaker 1: a little bit of a safety net. But again, there
1:13:21
Speaker 1: is no FDIC for life insurance. What exists is a
1:13:24
Speaker 1: state by state system called guarantee associations. Now they're paid
1:13:29
Speaker 1: for by assessments on other insurance companies in that state.
1:13:33
Speaker 1: It's like everybody has to pay this fee. It's protection
1:13:36
Speaker 1: fee in case one of them goes under. But there's caps,
1:13:40
Speaker 1: So in most states it's three hundred thousand dollars on
1:13:42
Speaker 1: a life insurance death benefit two hundred and fifty thousand
1:13:45
Speaker 1: dollars on an annuity per person, per company, not per policy. So, folks,
1:13:52
Speaker 1: if you have the following, if you have three separate
1:13:56
Speaker 1: one hundred thousand dollars annuities at the same company, those
1:14:00
Speaker 1: aren't all those are those aren't separately protected. In most states,
1:14:07
Speaker 1: it gets combined and you essentially you don't have each
1:14:11
Speaker 1: one hundred thousand dollars annuity completely protected. You only have
1:14:15
Speaker 1: two hundred and fifty thousand dollars of your total three
1:14:18
Speaker 1: hundred thousand dollars protected. Maybe you get it back, maybe
1:14:23
Speaker 1: you don't. By the way, we've actually run this experiment once.
1:14:28
Speaker 1: In nineteen ninety one, there was a California ensure that
1:14:31
Speaker 1: the state of California seized a company called Executive Life.
1:14:34
Speaker 1: It was the biggest life insurance failure in American history.
1:14:36
Speaker 1: At the time. Four hundred thousand policy holders sold high
1:14:40
Speaker 1: yield annuities and backed them with junk bonds. Remember the
1:14:43
Speaker 1: junk bond era. When the junk bond market collapsed, so
1:14:47
Speaker 1: did the company. People above the caps, including people living
1:14:51
Speaker 1: on injury settlements, had to take permanent losses because of
1:14:54
Speaker 1: the cap that I just told you about. Here's a
1:14:56
Speaker 1: fun little footnote, though, that nobody remembers. The man who
1:14:59
Speaker 1: won the auction for Executive Life's junk bond portfolio was
1:15:04
Speaker 1: Leon Black, who had just started a new firm out
1:15:06
Speaker 1: of the wreckage of Drexel Burnham. That firm, Apollo. The
1:15:12
Speaker 1: Executive Life bonds helped make Apollo, and Apollo now owns
1:15:17
Speaker 1: one of the largest annuity companies in America. Now, Apollo
1:15:21
Speaker 1: will tell you they learn their lisson. Perhaps they did.
1:15:24
Speaker 1: They say Athene's investments are higher quality and better matched
1:15:28
Speaker 1: than anything executive Life ever had. Maybe they're right, but
1:15:32
Speaker 1: we've never had a test. Nobody's tested at this size.
1:15:37
Speaker 1: And this part is what keeps me up at night.
1:15:39
Speaker 1: The more I dig into this, the more I wish
1:15:41
Speaker 1: I sometimes hadn't you know, Sometimes stick in your head
1:15:44
Speaker 1: in the sand makes you feel better. We spent the
1:15:45
Speaker 1: last fifteen years learning to watch banks. The FED can
1:15:48
Speaker 1: look across the whole banking system at once. Nobody does
1:15:51
Speaker 1: that for life insurance. Insurance is regulated by the states.
1:15:55
Speaker 1: Every company has a home state that watches it. They
1:15:57
Speaker 1: coordinate through a national association. I'm federal agencies c pieces.
1:16:02
Speaker 1: So it isn't the wild West, But I want to
1:16:04
Speaker 1: be precise about the problem because it isn't the one
1:16:07
Speaker 1: people assume. The problem is not that state regulators are
1:16:11
Speaker 1: lazy or bought off. The problem is that they're doing
1:16:14
Speaker 1: exactly the job we gave them. So an Iowa and
1:16:17
Speaker 1: Insurance commissioner is responsible for whether an Iowa insurance company
1:16:20
Speaker 1: can pay its claims, not the parent company of that
1:16:23
Speaker 1: insurance company, not the investment firm managing the money, not
1:16:27
Speaker 1: the offshore reinsure, say in Bermuda, not the private loan
1:16:31
Speaker 1: on the other end. So the commissioner can examine the
1:16:34
Speaker 1: company thoroughly, competently by the book, with a whole bunch
1:16:39
Speaker 1: of blinders on, and they still might not see the
1:16:42
Speaker 1: bigger thing that matters. The insurer is in one state,
1:16:47
Speaker 1: the parent company might be in another, the investment manager
1:16:50
Speaker 1: in a yet another, the company making the loan in another.
1:16:53
Speaker 1: You see where I'm going here. The loan is private,
1:16:55
Speaker 1: no market price, it's just a model and a chunk
1:16:59
Speaker 1: of the album. Delegations may have been shipped to an
1:17:01
Speaker 1: affiliate reinsurance Bermuda. You see where this is going. So
1:17:05
Speaker 1: every regulator in this chain can do the job perfectly,
1:17:08
Speaker 1: and nobody gets to see what the entire machine looks like.
1:17:12
Speaker 1: And this should sound familiar to people. After nine to
1:17:15
Speaker 1: eleven we concluded the intelligence failure wasn't because we didn't
1:17:19
Speaker 1: have the intelligence about the nine to eleven attacks. It
1:17:22
Speaker 1: was that the FBI knew one piece, the CIA knew another,
1:17:26
Speaker 1: and nobody was allowed or even required to put them
1:17:29
Speaker 1: on the same table so that we could see the
1:17:30
Speaker 1: whole thing. Silos. Remember that we spent a decade and
1:17:34
Speaker 1: an enormous amount of money trying to get rid of
1:17:37
Speaker 1: those intelligence silos. Well, we have now rebuilt those silos
1:17:42
Speaker 1: in American finance after nine to eleven. Nobody designed the
1:17:47
Speaker 1: silos on purpose, but the fragmentation is the selling point.
1:17:52
Speaker 1: You choose your home state, you choose your reinsurance company country.
1:17:55
Speaker 1: You can structure things so that no single regulator has
1:17:58
Speaker 1: both the authority and the you to see the whole machine.
1:18:02
Speaker 1: It's legal. Every industry shopped for friendlier regulators. Why do
1:18:05
Speaker 1: you think the state of Delaware exists? But in most
1:18:08
Speaker 1: industries when that goes wrong, shareholders lose money. In this one,
1:18:13
Speaker 1: a widow is going to lose her income. Now, look,
1:18:17
Speaker 1: you want to push back against me on this, I'll
1:18:19
Speaker 1: make my own I'll make my own case against it. One.
1:18:22
Speaker 1: When these firms bought into life insurance, they were often
1:18:24
Speaker 1: buying obligations nobody else wanted, so somebody had to hold them. Okay, Two,
1:18:29
Speaker 1: Not one private equity owned life insurer has failed yet,
1:18:31
Speaker 1: not one, So my worry is a projection. Their record
1:18:35
Speaker 1: is a record. Three state regulators are to sleep here,
1:18:40
Speaker 1: and we see in this case with Mark Walter there
1:18:43
Speaker 1: is at least some acknowledgment, and perhaps this will get
1:18:47
Speaker 1: more regulators looking at other private equity owned life insurance companies.
1:18:53
Speaker 1: But notice what all three of these pushbacks have in common.
1:18:57
Speaker 1: They're about whether any single company is sound. But that's
1:19:01
Speaker 1: not my worry. My worry is that we have nine
1:19:02
Speaker 1: hundred billion dollars of hard to sell loans sitting inside
1:19:06
Speaker 1: of life insurance companies, that a lot of it was
1:19:09
Speaker 1: made by the same firms managing those books of the
1:19:11
Speaker 1: life insurance company, and that the value is set by
1:19:15
Speaker 1: a model instead of a market inflated valuations. So if
1:19:20
Speaker 1: the credit cycle turns, it turns for everybody at the
1:19:23
Speaker 1: same time, fifty regulators, each looking at their own slice.
1:19:28
Speaker 1: So as an outlier is it a canary? Mark Walter
1:19:31
Speaker 1: may end up being an outlier. Investigators are going to
1:19:34
Speaker 1: decide this. But the system that let his insurance companies
1:19:38
Speaker 1: get tangled up with his own empire, that is not
1:19:40
Speaker 1: the outlier, Folks. The canary doesn't create the gas. The
1:19:46
Speaker 1: canary tells you the gas is there. A it is
1:20:00
Speaker 1: time to go back into the time machine. Where am
1:20:03
Speaker 1: I going? Well, I'm going to nineteen fifty, but I
1:20:07
Speaker 1: have a feeling. It's something that may repeat itself in
1:20:11
Speaker 1: the future. Stick with me here. It's the day the
1:20:14
Speaker 1: president sees the railroads. It was this week in nineteen fifty,
1:20:18
Speaker 1: the President of the United States sees the American railroad system.
1:20:21
Speaker 1: And I mean that almost literally. Harry Truman signed in
1:20:24
Speaker 1: an executive order directing the United States Army to take
1:20:27
Speaker 1: possession of the nation's railroads. Now, before you hear railroads
1:20:31
Speaker 1: and picture Amtrak, you have to put yourself in nineteen fifty,
1:20:36
Speaker 1: there's no interstate highway system. That does not exist yet.
1:20:39
Speaker 1: The commercial jet age has yet to begin. Private railroad
1:20:43
Speaker 1: companies are carrying passengers, freight, mail, coal, food, industrial materials,
1:20:49
Speaker 1: military equipment across the country. It is the primary transportation
1:20:54
Speaker 1: system that we have at that time. So imagine, basically,
1:20:57
Speaker 1: imagine a president today taking control of the airlines and
1:21:00
Speaker 1: then add FedEx and ups and a significant chunk of
1:21:04
Speaker 1: long haul trucking. Right, that's closer to what taking possessions
1:21:08
Speaker 1: of the railroads meant in nineteen fifty. All right, And
1:21:11
Speaker 1: Truman did it because he believed he had an emergency.
1:21:14
Speaker 1: But there's something important to understand right up front. Harry
1:21:17
Speaker 1: Truman didn't simply wake up one morning and invent the
1:21:20
Speaker 1: power to seize americans transportation system. Congress had given the
1:21:24
Speaker 1: president a tool, and Truman had gotten very comfortable using
1:21:27
Speaker 1: said tool. And that's where this story gets interesting. If
1:21:31
Speaker 1: you go back to World War One. In nineteen sixteen,
1:21:33
Speaker 1: Congress included a provision in the Army Appropriations Act giving
1:21:36
Speaker 1: the president authority in time of war to take possession
1:21:40
Speaker 1: and assume control of transportation systems for military purposes. Right.
1:21:44
Speaker 1: Remember the Defense Production Act during COVID. Right, it's basically
1:21:48
Speaker 1: a precursor to that. So a provision buried inside a
1:21:52
Speaker 1: defense funding bill becomes the legal foundation for presidential seizures
1:21:55
Speaker 1: more than thirty years later. It's pretty ironic. We've never
1:21:58
Speaker 1: seen that before. Right. Woodrow Wilson uses the authority during
1:22:01
Speaker 1: World One, Franklin Roosevelt uses the federal seizure authority during
1:22:05
Speaker 1: World War II, and then Harry Truman arrives. And here's
1:22:08
Speaker 1: the part I didn't fully appreciate until I started digging
1:22:11
Speaker 1: into this anniversary. Nineteen fifty wasn't even Truman's first railroad seizure.
1:22:16
Speaker 1: He'd already done it twice in May of forty six,
1:22:19
Speaker 1: a nationwide railroad labor crisis is building. Truman takes possession
1:22:23
Speaker 1: of the railroads on May seventeenth. Six days later, the
1:22:26
Speaker 1: engineers and trainmen walk out anyway, and Truman is furious.
1:22:29
Speaker 1: He goes to Capitol Hill ask Congress for authority to
1:22:32
Speaker 1: draft striking railroad workers into the US Army. And here's
1:22:36
Speaker 1: the scene. Truman is standing in the House Chamber delivering
1:22:39
Speaker 1: the speech. The President of the United States is asking
1:22:42
Speaker 1: Congress to give him the power to put striking railroad
1:22:45
Speaker 1: workers into military service. And while he's speaking, somebody hands
1:22:51
Speaker 1: him a note the strike has been settled. Truman reads
1:22:56
Speaker 1: the news aloud from the podium. The House goes ahead
1:23:00
Speaker 1: and overwhelmingly passes the legislation Truman wants anyway, but the
1:23:03
Speaker 1: Senate never does because you had conservatives like Robert Taft
1:23:07
Speaker 1: and others resisting it. The authority died there. Congress said no,
1:23:11
Speaker 1: but remember that, because we're going to seem the same
1:23:14
Speaker 1: basic constitutional problem six years later. So then in nineteen
1:23:17
Speaker 1: forty eight, another railroad dispute, Truman takes possession again, and
1:23:22
Speaker 1: then comes nineteen fifty So by the time we get
1:23:25
Speaker 1: to the anniversary that we're marking this week. The railroad
1:23:28
Speaker 1: seizure isn't some extraordinarily new idea inside the Truman White House.
1:23:33
Speaker 1: It's become almost routine. That's important because president doesn't merely
1:23:40
Speaker 1: accumulate across presidencies. Sometimes it accumulates inside of one presidency.
1:23:45
Speaker 1: You use an extraordinarily extraordinary tool once, then again, by
1:23:49
Speaker 1: the third time not so extraordinary. In August nineteen fifty,
1:23:53
Speaker 1: the Korean War is barely two months old. North Korea
1:23:56
Speaker 1: invaded South Korean June. American troops are now fighting. Moving
1:24:00
Speaker 1: an American military in nineteen fifty requires railroads. Troops have
1:24:04
Speaker 1: to reach bases and ports. Weapons have to move, raw
1:24:07
Speaker 1: materials have to reach factories, coal has to reach power plants.
1:24:11
Speaker 1: So at the same time Trump Trump Truman is dealing
1:24:14
Speaker 1: with a labor dispute involving the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen
1:24:18
Speaker 1: and the Order of Railway Conductors. The unions have rejected
1:24:21
Speaker 1: recommendations from an emergency board created under the Railway Labor Act.
1:24:26
Speaker 1: They call a nationwide strike for August twenty eight. Truman
1:24:30
Speaker 1: decides the country just can't risk that. On August twenty fifth,
1:24:34
Speaker 1: he signs Executive Order ten one fifty five, and at
1:24:38
Speaker 1: four o'clock in the afternoon on August twenty seventh, the
1:24:41
Speaker 1: Army formally takes possession of the railroads. The strike is
1:24:44
Speaker 1: supposed to begin the next morning, and America basically keeps moving.
1:24:48
Speaker 1: There aren't generals driving locomotives. The Army doesn't replace the
1:24:51
Speaker 1: existing railroad management. The companies remain privately owned, but operational
1:24:55
Speaker 1: control now rests with the federal government and the legal base.
1:25:00
Speaker 1: This matters enormously here Trump Truman isn't simply saying I'm president.
1:25:06
Speaker 1: There's an emergency. By the way, I kept writing Trump
1:25:09
Speaker 1: instead of Truman, you know, sort of habit here tru anyway,
1:25:12
Speaker 1: you can see why. That's why it showed have been
1:25:14
Speaker 1: by notes a few times. Brodian slipped much right, But
1:25:19
Speaker 1: he saw it as an emergency. Therefore, he thought he
1:25:21
Speaker 1: could see the railroads. Congress had given presidents explicit authority
1:25:25
Speaker 1: over transportation systems in time of war in that nineteen
1:25:29
Speaker 1: sixteen law. Now there's an honest constitutional wrinkle here. The
1:25:33
Speaker 1: Korean War was never never formally declared by Congress, so
1:25:36
Speaker 1: whether Korea actually satisfied the statute's time of war language
1:25:41
Speaker 1: could have become a very interesting legal question, but nobody
1:25:44
Speaker 1: tested that. The railroads never challenged the seize. You're in court,
1:25:49
Speaker 1: so Truman's authority in nineteen fifty was never actually tested.
1:25:52
Speaker 1: But compared with what he's going to do two years
1:25:54
Speaker 1: later with steel, he's standing on considerably firmer statutory grant.
1:26:00
Speaker 1: Keep that in mind, because two years later, hermy Truman doesn't.
1:26:04
Speaker 1: Government possession prevents the immediate nationwide shutdown, but it doesn't
1:26:08
Speaker 1: solve the labor dispute. In nineteen fifty one, railroad yardmen
1:26:12
Speaker 1: began walking off the jobs, and this isn't even an
1:26:15
Speaker 1: authorized national union strike. It was actually a wildcat union
1:26:19
Speaker 1: leadership couldn't control it. The army technically controls the railroad system. Still,
1:26:24
Speaker 1: the unions can't fully control their own workers, and trains
1:26:27
Speaker 1: still stop moving. There's something almost perfect about all this.
1:26:33
Speaker 1: The president is taking control of an industry partly to
1:26:35
Speaker 1: ensure the country can control its transportation system, and then
1:26:38
Speaker 1: discovers that neither the government nor the union leadership can
1:26:41
Speaker 1: command thousands of workers to cooperate. Possession is not the
1:26:46
Speaker 1: same thing as control, and the dispute drags on. Federal
1:26:51
Speaker 1: possession of the railroads continued until May nineteen fifty two,
1:26:54
Speaker 1: nearly two years later, and by then Truman is confronting
1:26:56
Speaker 1: another labor crisis, this time steal. So it's April fifty two,
1:27:01
Speaker 1: the Korean War is still going, steel workers are preparing
1:27:04
Speaker 1: to strike, and steel is obviously indispensable in an war effort.
1:27:08
Speaker 1: Tanks needed weapons, you know it. So Harry Truman reaches
1:27:11
Speaker 1: for what by now has become a familiar presidential instinct.
1:27:15
Speaker 1: It's kind of like Trump right with his tariffs. An
1:27:17
Speaker 1: essential industry is threatened during a war, the national interest
1:27:21
Speaker 1: requires uninterrupted production. President has to act. So on April eighth,
1:27:25
Speaker 1: Truman orders Commerce Secretary Charles Sawyer to take possession of
1:27:29
Speaker 1: America's steel mills. Except this time there's a problem. Congress
1:27:33
Speaker 1: never gave him this power, and that's the whole story.
1:27:37
Speaker 1: The railroad seizure and the steel seizure can look almost
1:27:40
Speaker 1: identical an emergency war labor dispute essential, but constitutionally they
1:27:44
Speaker 1: were very different. With the railroads, Congress had passed a
1:27:47
Speaker 1: law giving the president wartime authority over transportation systems. With steel,
1:27:53
Speaker 1: there was no comparable statue, and when Congress passed the
1:27:58
Speaker 1: Taft Hartley Act, it add considered giving the president seizure
1:28:01
Speaker 1: authority in labor emergencies, but they chose not to. So
1:28:05
Speaker 1: Truman isn't filling some obvious whole Congress forgot about. He
1:28:09
Speaker 1: took an action Congress had declined to authorize. So Truman
1:28:13
Speaker 1: asked Congress for extraordinary power over striking railroad workers. House
1:28:17
Speaker 1: said yes, Senate said no back in forty six. Right, Well,
1:28:20
Speaker 1: Truman had encountered this problem before, and the steel companies,
1:28:24
Speaker 1: unlike the railroad companies, decided to sue. The case got
1:28:27
Speaker 1: to the Supreme Court quickly and lessen too much later,
1:28:29
Speaker 1: the Court ruled six to three against Truman. Hugo Black
1:28:34
Speaker 1: wrote in the majority opinion, presidential power has to come
1:28:37
Speaker 1: from the Constitution or from an Act of Congress. Period.
1:28:41
Speaker 1: An emergency doesn't create a power that isn't there. But
1:28:45
Speaker 1: the opinion that ends up having perhaps the longest life
1:28:48
Speaker 1: comes from Justice Robert Jackson. And Jackson gives us the
1:28:51
Speaker 1: framework that lawyers still use today. When a president acts
1:28:54
Speaker 1: with congressional authorization. Presidential power is at its strongest when
1:28:59
Speaker 1: Congress hasn't clearly spoken. There's what Jackson calls a zone
1:29:04
Speaker 1: of twilight. But when a president acts against the expressed
1:29:09
Speaker 1: or implied will of Congress. Presidential power is at its
1:29:13
Speaker 1: lowest level. And look at Truman's two seizures through the
1:29:17
Speaker 1: Jackson Framework railroads. Congress had actually given him a tool.
1:29:21
Speaker 1: We can debate whether there was a war declared or not,
1:29:26
Speaker 1: but it was a it was accepted, it was a
1:29:29
Speaker 1: wartime Steele. Congress hadn't given him that tool, and that
1:29:35
Speaker 1: was the difference. Now, look, there's a subtle lesson here
1:29:37
Speaker 1: about power. The railroad seizure didn't teach Harry Truman that
1:29:41
Speaker 1: presidents inherently had the power to seize essential industries. Legally,
1:29:45
Speaker 1: it couldn't. He was relying on an authority Congress had
1:29:47
Speaker 1: given the presidency. But politically it taught him a habit.
1:29:51
Speaker 1: Three railroad seizures forty six, forty eight, and fifty each
1:29:55
Speaker 1: time there's a crisis, each time the federal government takes possession,
1:29:58
Speaker 1: each time the country keeps going. And then steel came along.
1:30:04
Speaker 1: Truman reached for the same kind of a solution, except
1:30:06
Speaker 1: this time the law isn't underneath him. He had gotten
1:30:09
Speaker 1: accustomed to using the power, which is why he went
1:30:11
Speaker 1: and grabbed for it. And he may have mistook the
1:30:13
Speaker 1: habit of authority, and it's something presidents mistakes. Presidents make often,
1:30:20
Speaker 1: and presidents have spent seventy plus years since that steel
1:30:24
Speaker 1: seizure failed steel seizure testing variations of the same question.
1:30:28
Speaker 1: Congress passes a law for one problem, the law stays
1:30:31
Speaker 1: on the books. Another president confronts a different problem years
1:30:34
Speaker 1: or decades later and says, maybe this gives me the
1:30:37
Speaker 1: authority I need. Right, Joe Biden tried it with student debt,
1:30:43
Speaker 1: that didn't work. We've seen wars with Iraq and Afghanistan
1:30:48
Speaker 1: get sort of misused for other things in Syria. Right, So,
1:30:57
Speaker 1: whatever you think of the policy itself, this pattern is fascinating.
1:31:00
Speaker 1: The emergency that produces the law is gone, but the
1:31:03
Speaker 1: law isn't. This is again yet another problem with Congress.
1:31:07
Speaker 1: When you give president's power, you got to remember to
1:31:10
Speaker 1: take it back. Presidents take advantage when power is given
1:31:14
Speaker 1: to them. The crisis is over, but the law stays
1:31:16
Speaker 1: on the books. Right, And we've just time and time
1:31:21
Speaker 1: again the underlying question doesn't ever seem to get answered.
1:31:26
Speaker 1: Where did the president get the authority? Did Congress give it?
1:31:29
Speaker 1: Did Congress remain silent? Did Congress effectively say no, which
1:31:35
Speaker 1: brings us back to nineteen fifty for another moment, because
1:31:38
Speaker 1: two weeks after Truman signs the order seizing the railroads,
1:31:41
Speaker 1: Truman signs another law on September eighth, the Defense Production Act,
1:31:46
Speaker 1: same president, same summer, same emergency, but this time Congress
1:31:49
Speaker 1: did explicitly give executive branch authority and an enormous toolbox
1:31:54
Speaker 1: for mobilizing private industry in the interest of national defense,
1:31:57
Speaker 1: prioritizing contracts, allocation of the thought tools for expanding productive
1:32:02
Speaker 1: capacity if necessary. So it's interesting. I mean, this is
1:32:07
Speaker 1: in some ways a proper response to the full on seizure.
1:32:10
Speaker 1: The sequence is interesting. Right on August twenty fifth, Trump
1:32:12
Speaker 1: reaches for an old power Congress had put into a
1:32:15
Speaker 1: defense bill in nineteen sixteen. A few weeks later, he
1:32:18
Speaker 1: signs a new law giving presidents another set of emergency powers.
1:32:22
Speaker 1: The railroad seizure eventually ends, Truman eventually leaves office, but
1:32:26
Speaker 1: the Defense Production Act stays, and presidents are still using
1:32:30
Speaker 1: that sucker to this day. So let's give you a hypothetical,
1:32:33
Speaker 1: and I want it to sound a tiny bit far fetched.
1:32:36
Speaker 1: Imagine there's a war five years from now, or a
1:32:38
Speaker 1: massive cyber attack or some national security emergency we haven't
1:32:42
Speaker 1: thought of yet, And the President decides, artificial intelligence has
1:32:45
Speaker 1: become as essentially the United States as the railroad system
1:32:48
Speaker 1: was in nineteen fifty. Maybe it's the AI companies themselves,
1:32:51
Speaker 1: Maybe it's the data centers, maybe it's the advanced chips.
1:32:54
Speaker 1: Maybe it's the enormous amount of electricity required to keep
1:32:56
Speaker 1: it all running. And the President says, we can't allow
1:32:59
Speaker 1: this infrastructure to operate entirely according to private priorities. During
1:33:02
Speaker 1: a national emergency, could the president take control of all
1:33:06
Speaker 1: of the tech companies. Well, Harry Truman learned the hard
1:33:08
Speaker 1: way that it's an emergency is not enough. The first
1:33:11
Speaker 1: question is what is Congress authorized? And a future president
1:33:15
Speaker 1: already has something. Harry Truman himself signed into law, the
1:33:17
Speaker 1: Defense Production Act, So a president might not have to
1:33:21
Speaker 1: send the army into the AI company's headquarters, but the
1:33:24
Speaker 1: federal government could potentially exercise enormous influence over chips, data
1:33:28
Speaker 1: center capacity, contracts, all sorts of stuff. And if a
1:33:32
Speaker 1: president tried to go beyond whatever Congress had authorized, somebody
1:33:36
Speaker 1: would sue, and when the case reached the court, somewhere
1:33:39
Speaker 1: in the arguments. You'll find the steel argument that was made,
1:33:44
Speaker 1: and you'll find justice Robert Jackson. And behind all that
1:33:49
Speaker 1: you'll find the railroad, the railroad story. So I like
1:33:53
Speaker 1: this anniversary harmon Harry Truman taking possession of America's railroads
1:33:56
Speaker 1: sounds bizarre today, but to understand the scale of it,
1:33:59
Speaker 1: forget track, think airlines, fed xups, long haul freight, the
1:34:03
Speaker 1: infrastructure which the American economy and military simply cannot function without.
1:34:08
Speaker 1: Then imagine a president saying for the duration of this emergency,
1:34:11
Speaker 1: the federal government is taking control. That actually happened. And
1:34:15
Speaker 1: the larger lesson isn't that presidents can seize whatever they
1:34:18
Speaker 1: want during an emergency. We learn that through the Steel seizure.
1:34:22
Speaker 1: The lesson is how presidential power actually accumulates. Congress is
1:34:25
Speaker 1: a president a tool because there's a real problem, the
1:34:28
Speaker 1: president uses it. The problem eventually changes, but the tool remains.
1:34:32
Speaker 1: Another president sees the unused tool. Sometimes the new use
1:34:36
Speaker 1: is legal, sometimes it isn't. He's been screwing around with
1:34:40
Speaker 1: it with the tariffs. This president has right. So what's
1:34:44
Speaker 1: today's railroad? What part of American life has become so
1:34:47
Speaker 1: essential that during the right emergency a president could plausibly
1:34:51
Speaker 1: argue that the national interest requires Washington to take control
1:34:54
Speaker 1: of it AI chips data centers. I don't know, but
1:35:01
Speaker 1: if and when that argument comes, it won't be a
1:35:02
Speaker 1: new argument. It'll just be a new technology. The constitutional
1:35:06
Speaker 1: argument is all going to sound a little bit like
1:35:08
Speaker 1: we're having a throwback to the Harry Truman years. There's
1:35:11
Speaker 1: your time machine, lessen for that, ask Chuck. All right,
1:35:23
Speaker 1: let's do a little last Chuck. Greetings once again from
1:35:28
Speaker 1: Michigan's third Congressional district. This is more of an observation
1:35:30
Speaker 1: than a question, but the recent revelation of Natalie Harp's
1:35:33
Speaker 1: letters to President Trump reminded me eerily of Isabelle Lyon's
1:35:37
Speaker 1: relationship with Mark Twain, as described in Sureness Biography. Things
1:35:41
Speaker 1: didn't end particularly well for Lyon, and given what we've
1:35:44
Speaker 1: seen happen in many people in Trump's orbit, I wonder
1:35:46
Speaker 1: if Harp could ultimately find herself in a similar position.
1:35:48
Speaker 1: Thanks Brad, Oh wow, yeah, you know. That was the
1:35:53
Speaker 1: most uncomfortable part of the churnout biography of Twain is
1:35:58
Speaker 1: Twain is reading about sort of the late in life
1:36:03
Speaker 1: relationship between had with so many young women that stayed
1:36:07
Speaker 1: at his place and all of that, and it's it's yes,
1:36:10
Speaker 1: we could say it's a different arrow, it's a different time,
1:36:13
Speaker 1: but man, you are you were getting your It's an
1:36:16
Speaker 1: interesting comparative. I thought you were going to go down
1:36:19
Speaker 1: down the road of Monica Lewinsky a little bit too,
1:36:22
Speaker 1: where there were staffers trying to trying to stop that. Look,
1:36:25
Speaker 1: I'll go back to say what I said before about
1:36:27
Speaker 1: Natalie Harp. You know, I think this is a troubled
1:36:31
Speaker 1: young woman and I'm just sort of exhausted from you know,
1:36:36
Speaker 1: our politics. A lot of people use politics as a
1:36:39
Speaker 1: substitute for therapy. I think we see it. There's a
1:36:44
Speaker 1: retiring member of Congress who clearly is screaming for you know,
1:36:49
Speaker 1: for some therapeutic help, and it's chosen other ways to
1:36:53
Speaker 1: do it. And you know that YouTube's filled with people
1:36:57
Speaker 1: who are trying to be in fluencers rather than dealing
1:37:01
Speaker 1: with their problems at home or whatever it is, and
1:37:04
Speaker 1: or trying to run for office or thinking politics is
1:37:06
Speaker 1: going to be the distraction that heals them from their
1:37:10
Speaker 1: own troubled issues or whatever. And so it's it's what, Look,
1:37:17
Speaker 1: I just the Harps. I'm troubled by the Harp story
1:37:19
Speaker 1: for so many reasons. I'm sorry that the President isn't
1:37:24
Speaker 1: grown up enough to see the damage he could be
1:37:26
Speaker 1: in it, perhaps inadvertently doing to her. It's clear to
1:37:32
Speaker 1: me that a whole bunch of people in the West
1:37:34
Speaker 1: wing are very concerned about what this relationship is, perhaps
1:37:39
Speaker 1: concerned about her in general, perhaps they're very concerned about
1:37:43
Speaker 1: her own mental health. Whatever it is, it's all troubling.
1:37:47
Speaker 1: It's all it's like, I just it's an ick story
1:37:54
Speaker 1: on a number of levels, and it's funny. I just
1:37:58
Speaker 1: don't I don't you know, with this is the type
1:38:01
Speaker 1: of stuff that doesn't show up in a focus group.
1:38:04
Speaker 1: Voters will never bring it up as a reason. But
1:38:08
Speaker 1: I think as you see the erosion of you know,
1:38:10
Speaker 1: Trump's job rating is only going in one direction, right,
1:38:14
Speaker 1: it's just a you know, his political health and his
1:38:17
Speaker 1: mental health are deteriorating almost at the same right. And
1:38:19
Speaker 1: it feels like at times, and this entire hard episode,
1:38:24
Speaker 1: it does, and you know, you actually bring up that
1:38:28
Speaker 1: was also a very fragile point in Twain's life. We're
1:38:31
Speaker 1: at a fragile point and Trump's life. Here's a man
1:38:35
Speaker 1: who's had self esteem issues his whole life. He's had
1:38:39
Speaker 1: poser complex his whole life. And he's a massive narcissist,
1:38:42
Speaker 1: right you throw all that together. He's at late stage
1:38:45
Speaker 1: of life. He's obviously his doctors have told him about
1:38:49
Speaker 1: all these extra health problems, and he's not shared with us.
1:38:53
Speaker 1: So it's plain and obvious for all of us to
1:38:54
Speaker 1: see that he's not the same guy as he was
1:38:56
Speaker 1: two years ago, let alone six years ago. He's losing
1:39:01
Speaker 1: political control, his grip on it, you know, So this
1:39:06
Speaker 1: is this, this whole but anyway, I just it's eerie
1:39:11
Speaker 1: you brought up. You brought up the part of the
1:39:14
Speaker 1: Twain biography, like you know, I just I hated it.
1:39:18
Speaker 1: I hated that part of it. I appreciate you gotta,
1:39:21
Speaker 1: I want the whole picture, you know, and I love
1:39:23
Speaker 1: Ron and his work. But that was a that's an
1:39:27
Speaker 1: interesting comparison, And in that sense, I think that's where
1:39:31
Speaker 1: there is some you know, there might be some some
1:39:36
Speaker 1: comparisons and your I am. I am quite concerned about
1:39:40
Speaker 1: this woman's health. Next question comes from Julie. She writes
1:39:45
Speaker 1: an unaffiliated North Carolina voter looking towards twenty twenty eight,
1:39:49
Speaker 1: Mark Kelly is the Democrat who most catches my eye,
1:39:52
Speaker 1: all right, Julie. He seems disciplined, patriotic, and moderate enough
1:39:55
Speaker 1: to peel to the center. What gives you pause about
1:39:57
Speaker 1: Kelly as a potential nominee? Why doesn't his name come
1:39:59
Speaker 1: up more often on the Republican side. Do you see
1:40:00
Speaker 1: a similar center leaning candidate emerging? Or as Maga made,
1:40:04
Speaker 1: that increasingly unlikely. I think in the twenty twenty eight cycle,
1:40:08
Speaker 1: it's hard to see how anybody associated with Trump somehow
1:40:12
Speaker 1: will make common ground with say a guy like you know,
1:40:16
Speaker 1: I'm trying to think of who could come from the
1:40:18
Speaker 1: center right that might be Pass Muster in a Republican primary,
1:40:24
Speaker 1: Spencer Cox and Utah, Dave McCormick from Pennsylvania, Glenn Youngkin,
1:40:32
Speaker 1: Nikki Haley, Right, I just don't think any of them.
1:40:35
Speaker 1: I don't think the I don't think the lane is
1:40:36
Speaker 1: big enough to build to build from. And you know,
1:40:42
Speaker 1: is it possible if if twenty twenty eight is just
1:40:45
Speaker 1: a Republican wipe twenty twenty six is a Republican wipeout,
1:40:48
Speaker 1: maybe that wing of the party gets more animated and
1:40:52
Speaker 1: gets more traction. But you're talking six seven Senate seats
1:40:56
Speaker 1: and thirty five House seats, which seems unrealistic. But if
1:40:59
Speaker 1: something on that scale happen, right, you know, let's say
1:41:04
Speaker 1: what I talked about earlier in this episode about what
1:41:06
Speaker 1: the tariffs and trade are doing. Two Republican chances and
1:41:10
Speaker 1: all those Senate races. Let's say Democrats win seventy five
1:41:13
Speaker 1: percent of those races, right, they pick up six seven seats.
1:41:17
Speaker 1: Maybe that sobers up that wing of the party and
1:41:19
Speaker 1: they get some traction. But I'm skeptical on there. I'm
1:41:23
Speaker 1: just as skeptical that the center left can can be
1:41:26
Speaker 1: progressive enough for the progressive I think the base of
1:41:29
Speaker 1: this party feels feels as if they don't have to
1:41:33
Speaker 1: compromise like they've compromised in the past. And I think
1:41:36
Speaker 1: that's that's where I'm skeptical Kelly can can be that
1:41:46
Speaker 1: it can be that bridge at the top of the ticket. Now,
1:41:48
Speaker 1: maybe he joins a more progress you know, a more
1:41:54
Speaker 1: progressive leaning nominee is the number two, and he is
1:41:59
Speaker 1: the he is the person that say, the more liberal
1:42:03
Speaker 1: nominee decides to pick to try to reach out to
1:42:06
Speaker 1: the center. So that's my skepticism about his ability to
1:42:12
Speaker 1: win over primary voters. But you know, I go back
1:42:16
Speaker 1: to something you've probably heard me say before. I mean,
1:42:19
Speaker 1: if the if you got rid of primaries and this
1:42:21
Speaker 1: were done in a dancy back room, I think I
1:42:25
Speaker 1: think it would be you know, I might do Kelly
1:42:30
Speaker 1: and Warnock or Warnock and Kelly. I might do Kelly
1:42:33
Speaker 1: and Wes Moore and Wes Moore and Kelly, you know,
1:42:36
Speaker 1: but those would be two of the three candidates I
1:42:40
Speaker 1: would be focused on the most. By the way, very
1:42:43
Speaker 1: intrigued by Mikey Cheryl going to New Hampshire trying to
1:42:46
Speaker 1: be and try explicitly getting involved in some of these
1:42:51
Speaker 1: center versus left primaries. She's supporting Seth Molten overh Ed Markey.
1:42:55
Speaker 1: Very curious to see, you know, in New Jersey. You know,
1:42:59
Speaker 1: New Jersey is a democratic state, but it's not a
1:43:01
Speaker 1: liberal state. And she's been very careful to govern the
1:43:08
Speaker 1: government that Democrats that govern New Jersey to liberally. That's
1:43:13
Speaker 1: who loses to your Chris Christie's and your Tom Kaynes
1:43:15
Speaker 1: and things like that. Shane are here and he writes
1:43:23
Speaker 1: I've been a fan since the Highline arrived by facts
1:43:25
Speaker 1: all right, and we definitely didn't photocopy any pages, wink wink.
1:43:29
Speaker 1: Shane says he runs Voter Force, which focuses on local
1:43:31
Speaker 1: campaign data, and I'm curious how far down the ballot
1:43:34
Speaker 1: do national political trends actually reach in a place like
1:43:36
Speaker 1: the Bay Area, could depress Republican enthusiasm or Democratic overperformance
1:43:40
Speaker 1: nationally actually change the electorate enough to determine something at
1:43:43
Speaker 1: a local or school you know, as local as a
1:43:46
Speaker 1: school parcel tax or a bond measure. You're the man,
1:43:50
Speaker 1: Chuck all the best, Shane, Well, I will take any
1:43:52
Speaker 1: compliments you want to throw my way. Please, thank you,
1:43:54
Speaker 1: thank you, No, no, no, please, yes. I mean, the
1:43:58
Speaker 1: biggest impact is just on basic turnout. Right, And so look,
1:44:03
Speaker 1: there's a couple of things that happen down the as
1:44:07
Speaker 1: as voters go down a ballot, fewer and fewer them vote. Right,
1:44:10
Speaker 1: there's this sort of the top of the ticket gets
1:44:12
Speaker 1: the most voters and there's a slow drop off. Maybe
1:44:15
Speaker 1: people feel uncomfortable making a choice about a race they
1:44:18
Speaker 1: don't know anything about. So in this case, I usually
1:44:23
Speaker 1: think that you know, if you're looking, you know, in
1:44:26
Speaker 1: this case, you're you're what you're looking at is correct.
1:44:28
Speaker 1: You're going to have an electorate that's likely going to
1:44:33
Speaker 1: just over index to the left than the right. Right,
1:44:35
Speaker 1: because there's more enthusiasm on the left than there is
1:44:38
Speaker 1: on the right, there'll be more voters staying home, so
1:44:41
Speaker 1: you you have fewer on the right, more on the left,
1:44:44
Speaker 1: and then you have this trickle down effect where fewer
1:44:46
Speaker 1: and fewer jump off. Well, you know, usually education attainment
1:44:51
Speaker 1: core correlates with how much of the ballot you're going
1:44:54
Speaker 1: to fill out. So if you if you just sort
1:44:57
Speaker 1: of use all of those metrics, yes, I think it has.
1:45:02
Speaker 1: I think it when it comes to just simple turnout
1:45:05
Speaker 1: and the makeup of the electorate, the top of the
1:45:09
Speaker 1: ticket and the national forces have a huge impact all
1:45:14
Speaker 1: the way down to the bottom because of this slow
1:45:16
Speaker 1: erosion effect as you go down the ballot. Right, But
1:45:19
Speaker 1: the fact of the matter is you're going to start with, say,
1:45:22
Speaker 1: on what you're describing here, you know, on a local
1:45:25
Speaker 1: school parcel tax, if maybe you're worried that the tax,
1:45:29
Speaker 1: You know that the farther down you go, the more
1:45:34
Speaker 1: you know, the more informed the voter is that's going
1:45:36
Speaker 1: to vote in that ballot. Right, So if you're starting
1:45:38
Speaker 1: with a group of voters that you think is more
1:45:40
Speaker 1: likely to be inclined with you, and you have the
1:45:42
Speaker 1: larger share at the top, even if you have this
1:45:44
Speaker 1: slow fade and this slow erosion of voters who just
1:45:47
Speaker 1: sort of drop off because they're just not going to
1:45:49
Speaker 1: vote in every race. You know, you see where you
1:45:54
Speaker 1: have that accumulated impact there, So absolutely I think it
1:45:57
Speaker 1: goes off. You know, the national mood shapes both the
1:46:03
Speaker 1: raw number of turnout and the makeup of the electorate itself,
1:46:07
Speaker 1: and that absolutely will have an impact all the way
1:46:09
Speaker 1: down the ballot. Jeremy writes Missouri's third Desk district here
1:46:15
Speaker 1: via mail in ballot from Japan. Oh right on, and
1:46:17
Speaker 1: hopefully he thinks this is his third time writing in,
1:46:20
Speaker 1: and he writes, what do you think is motivating Darling
1:46:22
Speaker 1: Graham to seek a full term after initially stepping in
1:46:24
Speaker 1: to compete to complete Lindsay's especially given her lack of
1:46:27
Speaker 1: political experience in recent debate performances. In Historically often has
1:46:31
Speaker 1: a spouser family member successfully continue to de cease politician's
1:46:34
Speaker 1: career beyond simply finishing their term. Thanks, Jeremy, Well, look,
1:46:38
Speaker 1: you have a lot more instances of widows succeeding spouses
1:46:45
Speaker 1: in house races it is. I mean, you know, I'll
1:46:49
Speaker 1: give you the Probably the most famous name is Mary Bono.
1:46:53
Speaker 1: Sonny Bono dies, married Bono, ran to replace him, and
1:46:56
Speaker 1: then she had a ten year career. Koki Roberts parents.
1:47:00
Speaker 1: You know, her father, Hail Bogs dies in a plane crash,
1:47:04
Speaker 1: her mother, Lindy Boggs, runs to replace him, and she
1:47:07
Speaker 1: has a distinguished career in Congress. So there's there's quite
1:47:09
Speaker 1: a few examples of that. It's a little less successful
1:47:12
Speaker 1: on the state wide level, and it's not tried as
1:47:16
Speaker 1: often on the statewide level. By the way, the new
1:47:20
Speaker 1: US Senator from Louisiana, the most likely US center from Louisiana,
1:47:23
Speaker 1: Julia Letlow. She remember, her husband died of COVID after
1:47:27
Speaker 1: he won election, but before he ever took the oath,
1:47:30
Speaker 1: and then she won a special and she's now going
1:47:35
Speaker 1: to have her own separate career. So most of this
1:47:37
Speaker 1: stuff is usually more successful in the house level. It's
1:47:40
Speaker 1: just you know, familiar name, the name you know, if
1:47:42
Speaker 1: you've ever seen the movie Distinguished Gentleman, the phrase I'm
1:47:46
Speaker 1: Jeff Jackson. The name you know, by the way, it's
1:47:51
Speaker 1: an oldly but a goodie. If you're looking for an
1:47:53
Speaker 1: old political movie to make you laugh, Eddie Murphy and
1:47:57
Speaker 1: distinguished gentleman. It's a classic. Please please please, if you've
1:48:01
Speaker 1: never seen it, do yourself a favor. Go skin. I'm
1:48:04
Speaker 1: sure it's streaming somewhere. But as for for the Senate race,
1:48:08
Speaker 1: I'm I'm high. I am. Look, Darling Graham has all
1:48:13
Speaker 1: the organization, and you know the infrastructure of the Republican
1:48:17
Speaker 1: Party is trying to drag her across the finish line.
1:48:21
Speaker 1: Tim Scott at the NSC and being a South Carolina politician, right,
1:48:25
Speaker 1: he's got to he's got to come through here. I
1:48:28
Speaker 1: think she's you know, I've you know, I know the
1:48:31
Speaker 1: prediction markets put this at more of a seventy thirty.
1:48:34
Speaker 1: I think this is closer to a fifty five to
1:48:35
Speaker 1: forty five percentage chance. I think it's gonna be awfully close.
1:48:41
Speaker 1: I think the debate plub flub is likely did penetrate
1:48:46
Speaker 1: coupled with Trump's grip on the party is slipping anyway, right,
1:48:51
Speaker 1: so you know, to be interesting, if she loses Trump's
1:48:56
Speaker 1: of they're all going to blame the debate club. You're
1:48:59
Speaker 1: asking me something I can't get inside her head. Why
1:49:01
Speaker 1: did she do it? You know, Lindsay had sort of
1:49:05
Speaker 1: made Darlene his political spouse every political campaign here. When
1:49:10
Speaker 1: he do his family ad, it was always with Darlene
1:49:13
Speaker 1: and her family. So she's kind of been at the
1:49:17
Speaker 1: periphery of his career. So this isn't like she just
1:49:20
Speaker 1: jumped in now, right, And she's had a few She's
1:49:25
Speaker 1: been on a couple of boards and commissions. I don't
1:49:26
Speaker 1: want to say they're ceremonial there. I think they were.
1:49:28
Speaker 1: There were real work that went into them. So I
1:49:30
Speaker 1: don't want to be dismissive and just say she got
1:49:32
Speaker 1: ceremonial posts. But she got the type of post that
1:49:35
Speaker 1: is patronage post right that you know she got it
1:49:38
Speaker 1: because she was the senator's sister. It's hard to say
1:49:40
Speaker 1: she got it on her own merits. That doesn't mean
1:49:43
Speaker 1: she didn't do a good job, okay, and she wouldn't
1:49:45
Speaker 1: be the first person to do that. So I'm you know,
1:49:49
Speaker 1: but I'm a look, I'm a I'm a bit of
1:49:56
Speaker 1: a of a role here. I told you, I'm not
1:49:58
Speaker 1: sure I buy Vinman. I'm and Gangie Nixon has a
1:50:00
Speaker 1: real shot here to win that thing. I feel the
1:50:03
Speaker 1: same way about Ralph Norman on this one. I think
1:50:05
Speaker 1: he has a real shot to win this thing, and
1:50:07
Speaker 1: we'll see it Tuesday night per live election results. And
1:50:09
Speaker 1: with that, I'm going to wrap up the Monday Podcast.
1:50:12
Speaker 1: I know I gave you a lot to chew on
1:50:14
Speaker 1: that That's why you come here for the Chuck Podcast.
1:50:17
Speaker 1: I'm not just going to give you one or two things.
1:50:19
Speaker 1: I'm going to give you the full meal of everything
1:50:23
Speaker 1: you need to understand about politics for the rest of
1:50:25
Speaker 1: us and what the hell this means for you. That's
1:50:28
Speaker 1: what I'm trying to do here. So with that, I
1:50:31
Speaker 1: will see you Tuesday for my Super Tuesday episode with
1:50:34
Speaker 1: Chris Eliza. We've got election results in South Carolina that's
1:50:38
Speaker 1: going to be exciting, and then we'll have and we've
1:50:42
Speaker 1: got more. Checkout Dynastic Pod. Please go take a look
1:50:44
Speaker 1: at that terrific episode this month Alabama football and that
1:50:52
Speaker 1: by the way, you're going to hear me talking more
1:50:53
Speaker 1: college football is a week gets out because guess what
1:50:55
Speaker 1: happens next weekend? Week zero is here. Yes, I care
1:51:00
Speaker 1: about Week zero two. All right, I'll see you in
1:51:03
Speaker 1: twenty four hours