David Knight-Legg is an international banker, an Albertan who was born here, raised here, educated here, and then spent most of his life working overseas in a highly professional, highly competitive industry. He is probably what Stephen Harper would call an anywhere person who can work anywhere in the world, as opposed to the rest of us who are someplace people who are kind of deeply connected, and yet he has deep connections in Alberta that have caused him to move back from the Far East and take up residence here.
00:00:31.620With me today is David Knight-Legg, who is an international banker, an Albertan who has
00:00:40.780born here, raised here, educated here, and then spent most of the rest of his life working
00:00:46.980overseas in a highly professional, highly competitive industry.
00:00:52.140He is probably what Stephen Harper would call an anywhere person who can work anywhere in the world, as opposed to the rest of us who are someplace people who are kind of deeply connected.
00:01:06.360And yet he has deep connections in Alberta that have caused him to move back from the Far East and take up residence here.
00:02:14.080Yeah, look, it's hard to imagine if you run scenarios of somebody who's a professional assassin and, you know, adversaries to the West feature professional assassins.
00:02:24.580Yeah, well, the Russians are famous for it and they usually have a victim every couple of years, you know, and they're creative with it.0.97
00:02:32.260but i think the issue is going to be when you've got uh amateurs able to get this close to the0.61
00:02:38.420president and get a shot off what happens if you've got somebody that's uh part of a deeply
00:02:44.100embedded very smart we are we are right to call this guy an amateur are we i look i i don't i
00:02:50.340don't know that the the secret service uh have already released profiles of him he's known um
00:02:56.420surprisingly there's actual tv interviews with this guy i mean it's it's extraordinary when
00:03:01.300these things come out how these connections get made it's one of the things that lead to conspiracy
00:03:05.060theories well he's been approvingly quoted in the financial times in the new york times and a number
00:03:09.460of other places i mean how do these guys get started i know that the the kid who tried to
00:03:15.940shoot the president uh off the roof was in a black black rock commercial um stunning yeah yeah i mean
00:03:23.300so but i think that i think that uh the issue the broader issue maybe you call it the meta
00:03:30.260issue is that you've got a dynamic in U.S. politics that's incredibly factionalist now,
00:03:37.460and that factualism can lead to violence. And I think the language that's been used about Donald
00:03:43.700Trump is alarmist. I have a very good friend, a reporter here, Andrew Coyne. And the two things I
00:03:50.180disagree with Andrew on routinely are truckers and Trump. You know, I think he misreads them.
00:03:54.580I think he's I think that United Empire loyalist conservatism in the in Ontario and Montreal sometimes, you know, privileges, peace and order over just about anything.
00:04:07.600And Trump is a disorderly, disruptive candidate as a conservative.
00:04:12.020And I'm sure Andrew would say he's not even a conservative.
00:04:16.760But I think that in both cases, they're conveying a message that needed to be heard to a tired, sclerotic, desiccated bureaucracy, both in the United States, that Trump is challenged and will certainly challenge in his next term if he wins, and that the truckers challenged very directly here.
00:04:38.520And here the truckers, you know, the challenge from the truckers did show that the tendency of the federal liberal party and the government was to invoke illegally and unconstitutionally acts that denied Canadians their civil rights.
00:04:54.680I think that there is going to be a real moment of figuring out exactly how this situation with these guys in coots and the situation with the freezing bank accounts using FinTrack terror legislation illegally by Christian Freeland goes down.
00:05:12.400I think we have to go through the process of evaluating what happened in COVID and what happened in these situations.
00:05:17.260And I think the U.S. is going to go through the process of what's happened and some of the reaction and the responses to Trump.
00:05:22.340Some of the reactions to Trump, the lawfare, the skullduggery with the FBI, the use of sort of the politicization of the state, FBI, and CIA on the letter about the Hunter Biden laptop turns out to be a completely false, knowingly false letter.
00:05:42.720Those are things that because Trump tested the system and put tension into the system, highlighted some of the latent corruption in the system by people that we expect a lot more of.
00:05:53.860And I think the same thing happened with the truckers here.
00:05:57.320So I think at a meta level, that's part of what's happening that we're seeing.
00:06:01.420I think the Secret Service, especially after what happened in and the Butler rally, is now technically, you know, covering Trump in a way that should have always been covered.
00:06:13.480And in this situation, you know, they got this guy immediately and actually shot back at him.
00:06:44.860And maybe some will be by this out of sympathy.
00:06:48.020But do you think anybody's going to walk over from the Harris camp and go with Trump
00:06:52.540because somebody took a second shot at him?
00:06:54.860So so when I when I was doing my Ph.D. work, I had to do a lot of demographic analysis to make the points that I needed to make my Ph.D.
00:07:05.120I was studying separatism and how laws and policies affect separatist movements around the world, how governments react both militarily, sometimes, sometimes with policy, etc.
00:07:16.000And when you look at something like a separatist movement or you look at the dynamics around a U.S. federal election, the thing that's very interesting is the correlations between issues and the way that people represent themselves as either Democrat, Republican or independent.
00:07:35.220it. And what's very interesting when you look at the data, if you dig into the data, there was a
00:07:41.340great poll that was released. And I actually put the data link on my Twitter feed when I made a
00:07:47.320point because I'm having, I have some open bets with some friends. I think Trump will win this
00:07:51.380election and they think there's no chance. And so I'm posting up things that I think that I see in
00:07:57.460my, here's my thesis for whatever it's worth. My thesis is that increasingly one of the meta
00:08:04.200of trends that's been occurring for the last 25 years in both Canada and the United States
00:08:08.680is more and more people are saying, I'm not going to tell you what color political card
00:08:14.740is in my wallet. It might be blue, it might be red, it might be orange in Canada, or it
00:08:19.140might be blue or red in the States. But an increasing number of people are saying, I
00:08:22.920don't have a card in my wallet. And of the people that do have a card in their wallet
00:08:26.900where they're a member of a party, they're saying, actually, this time around, I like
00:08:32.260my party, but I like the local guy who's running for the other party better because he's somebody
00:08:36.560that I think speaks for me or makes me proud or is endearing, right? And so what's really
00:08:42.380interesting is the loyalty that people are expressing to their party and the number of
00:08:48.340people that are just saying, I'm not loyal to any party has been growing. And so what you've got as
00:08:53.440it's happening is you've got two very interesting trends. One trend is the liberals and the
00:09:00.300democrats of the states are becoming harder left in their base the people that animate that party
00:09:05.120and its policies are becoming harder left same thing on the right same thing in the middle in
00:09:10.940in other words pox on both your houses and so people are becoming more polarized but as a result
00:09:16.080of that polarization more and more people are saying i'm actually a person that will vote
00:09:19.860my interests in a more uh sort of unusually unpredictable way than used to be the case
00:09:27.720If you buy that, and there's some debate around whether or not that's true, then one of the features of this election is that independents matter more than ever before.
00:09:39.420And if you look at the polls in the eight states that will determine this election, the swing states, the states that aren't already governed by majorities that are either Democratic, California and New York, or clearly Republican like Texas and Florida,
00:09:54.380When you look at the eight states whose electoral college votes will determine the winner, those eight states have very high marginal numbers of independents.
00:10:04.140And within the independents, they're breaking right now 60-40 for Trump.
00:10:09.300The independents that are saying, we're going to pick.
00:10:30.260I think the reason the bump didn't occur is because Trump did a deal with RFK Jr.
00:10:34.820that they had an almost theatrical presentation of, where RFK Jr. came in and said,
00:10:41.820I'm here to make America healthy again, M-A-H-A, Maha, which is a play on make America great.
00:10:49.160Trump didn't just take the endorsement.
00:10:51.580He actually said, I'm going to appoint RFK Jr. and his running mate, Nicole Shanahan, as well as Tulsi Gabbard, to my transition team, along with my sons.
00:11:01.540We're creating a coalition and a team of rivals.
00:11:04.400And they're going to go off and they're going to focus on this message of make America healthy again.
00:11:09.480Now, you're not seeing this message play out very much in Trump rallies.
00:11:13.040I mean, once in a while, we'll come on.
00:11:15.660When you look at Nicole Shanahan's account on Twitter, YouTube or Instagram.0.92
00:11:20.500now for those who don't know nicole shanahan is rfk's uh she was yeah the vice presidential
00:11:26.180candidate people forget rfk in the spring was polling as high as 15 nationally and higher than
00:11:32.580that in the 20s in particular states the independence that that's the highest third
00:11:38.180party candidate polling since ross perot the independents are an extremely important cohort
00:11:44.500and the three themes that the independents that are former democrats rfk nicole shanahan and
00:11:50.500um tulsi gabbard and others are hitting are number one what happened with the pandemic and
00:11:57.460what is it about vaccines why are why have kids gone from having five vaccines to now having 30
00:12:02.740right and what's what is that doing for a series of uh negative health outcomes for children
00:12:08.180it's a lot of conspiracy stuff around there's a lot of debate around that but the point is
00:12:11.940it matters greatly to certain people and a lot of the people it matters to are independents
00:12:17.380they don't affiliate with the other party um so trump has a chance trump is better than a chance
00:12:23.460when you look at and and i'll you know i'll send you uh the the tweet that i put out because my
00:12:28.740friend said you're you're crazy um uh harris is pulling four points ahead of trump and i i said
00:12:35.380send me that that that poll they sent me the poll i'll tell you what was wrong with the poll first
00:12:40.420thing was wrong with the poll registered voters right registered voters is like trying to pull
00:12:45.620the entire country. Just like Canadians, a minority of people vote. So if you just take0.52
00:12:54.600registered voters, you're getting a preference. If you take likely voters, you're taking people
00:12:59.300that not only have a preference to vote, but have a history of voting. And they control for that by
00:13:03.380saying, have you voted recently? Did you vote in the last election? How do you identify?
00:13:07.060So they'll find out, okay, is this just somebody that's an American that's registered to vote? Or
00:13:11.180is this somebody that actually tends to actually go out and put their money where their mouth is
00:13:15.200cast a vote. When you use likely voters and when you read polls, look if it says RV, which is
00:13:21.120registered voters or LV, they'll list the number of people and then they'll put RV or LV to indicate
00:13:25.960the degree of correlation between intention and outcomes, right? Second thing that happened with
00:13:32.680the poll that I was sent was it's a national poll. And national polls tend to run a selection
00:13:39.540around cohorts that are similar to the cohorts that have voted in the past.
00:13:45.200And so one of the reasons that the last election between Biden and Trump was so miscalled by the pollsters is because they were overweighting when they were doing polling.
00:13:53.780They were overweighting traditionally strong Democratic voting cohorts when they asked people, how are you going to vote?
00:13:59.880So if you if you ask a lot, it'd be like running a poll in Edmonton saying, how are you going to vote in the next election?
00:14:05.500And then turning around saying the NDP have a way better chance than we thought.
00:14:09.000and then running another poll down where I come from in Southern Alberta and saying,
00:14:13.620how are you going to vote in the next election?
00:14:14.940Saying, look, the conservatives are going to take this thing in a landslide, right?
00:14:18.120The places and the people you ask those questions have determined the kinds of outcomes the polls give you.
00:14:23.780I would have hoped that the pollsters were more sophisticated than that, David.
00:14:28.480They're sophisticated, but what happens is it's a very tricky thing.
00:14:33.240They underpolled Obama because they didn't expect such a strong cohort of African-American voters
00:14:37.460when Obama actually was elected president.
00:14:40.140And then they underpolled Trump because they expected them.
00:14:43.600They were still sampling based on the last two presidential elections turnouts by demographic sample.
00:14:49.620And they overpolled African-Americans as a result, which showed a preference for Hillary Clinton that didn't play out in the actual 2016 outcome.
00:14:57.980So let's say that you are right and that you collect from Andrew Coyne.0.94
00:16:19.880He is going to be more protectionist, which is an unusual thing to say about a conservative government.
00:16:26.100He's not so much a libertarian as a nationalist.
00:16:28.260But his protectionism is deeply pragmatic. And you saw this with the CUSMA replacement of NAFTA. Bob Lighthizer is very specific. He's written a great book on it. There's, you know, no trade is free. And they're very clear about what they want to do and how they want to do it.
00:16:46.940Now, some of what Trump brought to the process has now become embedded institutionally in the way the U.S. operates.
00:16:54.220So the idea that you want to replace multilateral agreements because they tend to be too watered down and weak and have structural defaults get exploited by a variety of partners and replaces bilateral.
00:17:07.260That's now become part and parcel of the way that a lot of of Americans think across the political spectrum.
00:17:13.120So some of these things that are differences between the Harris and Trump teams, when it actually comes time to implement these things, you're going to see a fair amount of symmetry.
00:17:24.200If you had said to somebody, you know, like we'll use Andrew, if you'd said to Andrew, you know, Harris is going to come out swinging for fracking in America, he would have told you to take a hike.
00:17:36.320You know, I wish I would have bet a bottle of wine on that.
00:17:39.620You have to support fracking in America now.
00:17:42.080Energy independence is now part of the storyline of what America is going to be as as a nation.
00:17:48.860Right. It's that debate is actually over with apologies to all my hard green alarmist friends.
00:17:54.380They've lost that debate. Right. And the fact that Harris has got to say that is because she wants to win in Pennsylvania.
00:18:02.440But and I'm not sure that she or the cohort like Biden, I'm not sure that she will be in control enough of of a Democrat based White House.0.59
00:18:10.960to be able to resist all of the green exclusions that they're going to want. But the fact that she
00:18:17.280has come out at the forefront of her campaign saying, I support fracking and I support a border
00:18:22.100wall, sort of shows you that the opposite of what Andrew says is true. Trump and Harris are going to
00:18:29.380have more things that look the same than things that differentiate them. And part of the reason
00:18:35.220for that is the way that the American system works. You have a deep division of powers between
00:18:41.040the judiciary, the Congress, the Senate, and the White House, the governors, you know, and you've
00:18:49.340got emerging consensus. The problem with illegal immigration in the United States, very similar to
00:18:54.920the runaway immigration in Canada, has created an untenable situation economically that people have
00:19:00.200connected for themselves. You might like it or not like it, but your party is never going to win0.99
00:19:03.920unless you say we're going to we're going to deal with it. Kamala Harris hasn't come out and said
00:19:08.180we got it right on immigration and everyone should relax. She's come out and said it's broken and it
00:19:12.320was Trump's fault and we're going to fix it and I'm going to build a border wall. She's had three
00:19:16.380and a half years to fix it. How is it Trump's fault? The Trump campaign is not doing a very
00:19:22.060good job in my humble opinion and I ran a campaign so I used to hate it when people would give me
00:19:26.880free advice from the sidelines you know they're not interested in my advice but I think that
00:19:33.320They've done a terrible job litigating what Kamala Harris is accountable for based on her role as vice president in the Biden White House.
00:19:41.540I think the Harris campaign has done a great job of creating a brand new constructed candidate that has very little to do with the most liberal senator in the U.S. Senate, which is how she was regarded when she was there.
00:19:57.120And they've somehow managed to erase things that she's on the record of that are very extreme.
00:20:01.920uh transgendered surgeries right she's very she was very extreme and on the record on well let's
00:20:08.540be fair she's had some help yeah yeah the media uh is you know the people in the media in the
00:20:15.940united states are more than 90 percent rec you know recognize themselves as democrats and i
00:20:21.220think they wanted somebody that they knew could replace biden and the democratic party has done
00:20:28.560a very effective tactical job of replacing president biden with his vice president without
00:20:34.780going through a um a normal democratic process oh it's an astonishing thing that she's allowed
00:20:40.060to run without answering the question madam the president biden has been a walking wreck
00:20:47.660for at least 18 months and possibly longer you knew why didn't you act that i i don't know what
00:20:55.180her answer would be, but nobody has really answered that question. I think that she has
00:21:03.540gotten a free pass on a lot of things. And you'll notice, I have two reasons for thinking that Trump
00:21:09.040will win. The first reason is that his deal with RFK is more important than people are thinking
00:21:16.240about. And people aren't seeing the power of the RFK, Shanahan, Gabbard, social media
00:21:22.860assault on key Democrat constituencies and independents. And I think that is being missed
00:21:30.220by the media. I think it's the most interesting political story happening right now. And I think
00:21:37.060that the second thing that is not well understood and is very important is in every single
00:21:43.200era of US presidential politics, there's a moment where one of the two candidates does a far better
00:21:49.740job than the other candidate at mastering whatever the communications media of the day is.
00:21:55.260And so very famously, when JFK, you know, RFK's uncle, ran for president against Richard Nixon,
00:22:02.660people listening on the radio, which had been the standard way that you would engage in politics,
00:22:08.360presidential debates at the time, thought that Nixon won hands down. But everybody that saw
00:22:13.080this newcomer on TV thought that JFK had won. And JFK's team had been very careful about
00:22:19.460giving him makeup, preparing him, shaving, resting him, right?
00:22:23.140And Richard Nixon just showed up for the debate on TV
00:22:25.720and treated it like it was a radio debate,
00:22:27.160and he was unshaven and looked sweaty.
00:24:16.940They're listening to there's this there's this entire pantheon of people that are very focused on podcasts.
00:24:23.380And, you know, the the number one feature of a lot of these podcasts, it's not nerdy stuff like we're talking about, like, you know, who's going to win the election.
00:24:44.280In the mainstream media, everyone's looking because they've only got two minutes to see the news, and they're doing it for a production cycle.
00:24:53.480They get told by their editor, we're not going to endorse some crazy conspiracy theories, too much crazy stuff.
00:25:09.660But what happened is the mainstream news is like, well, it turns out some weird conspiracy theorists want you to take a horse to you.
00:25:14.880How embarrassing. Everyone laughs and everybody that watches TV gets told, you know, wow, I'd be dumb if I went and tried to find this alternative solution.
00:25:24.640Podcasts took off during the pandemic.
00:25:27.980And now these podcasters have viewing audiences that run into 30, 40, 50 million people.
00:25:34.180And people have forgotten how powerful these people are.0.76
00:25:37.220And the difference is that candidate Harris, Vice President Harris, is not allowing herself to get anywhere near deep dive textured interviews that ask wild questions.0.99
00:25:51.140She's super nervous about her team, super nervous about it.
00:25:54.140Trump and J.D. Vance are on these things all the time, but so is RFK Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, Elon Musk, people that have come out, Peter Thiel, people have come out and said,
00:26:05.080I'm actually going to endorse this guy, and I'm going to work for him.
00:26:08.040And so I think that podcasts and the distribution of the number of surrogates that are willing to have deep, textured conversations,
00:26:16.080and people can listen to them and say, you know, I agree with about 80% of what he said.
00:26:19.34020% sounds a little crazy to me, but I like that 80%.
00:26:22.400Those are the people that are sitting in that cohort that are going to make the difference in this election.
00:26:26.640So my prediction is it's going to be independence.
00:26:29.860When you see exit polls, it's going to be independent reference people that decide the difference between Trump and Harris.
00:26:35.080They're going to split Trump and Harris about 60-40, 70-30.
00:26:39.860And that cohort is going to decide the election in the eight swing states.