Western Standard Opinion Editor Nigel Hannaford and Senior Editor Corey Morgan join host Derek Fildebrandt for a special election night edition of the Western Standard News Network's election night coverage. Western Standard is one of the few independent, non-profit news outlets in Canada, and it's not about Canada tonight. . Tonight we're watching the big U.S. General Election, the presidency, the Senate, the House, and a bunch of other races that we're probably not going to be talking about.
00:05:20.480We're going to bring him in now is Western Standard News editor and chief editor Dave Naylor coming to us from the Western Standard Newsroom.
00:05:27.940I can actually see him through the glass over here.
00:07:30.660So some of the states will be done today.
00:07:34.100And really, you know, there's the hard blue states.
00:07:36.280there's the hard red states uh you can make pretty early predictions based on the different
00:07:41.480counties coming in based on historical predictors um but i you know i i'm not sure bc gets to uh
00:07:48.800be that obvious of some states i think pennsylvania pennsylvania could be going on a long time uh we
00:07:54.160all remember think back i was in high school not watching this in terribly much detail but i remember
00:07:57.880back in high school with the bush gore election florida that got hung up into the courts for
00:08:02.600months before uh that election was certified dangling chads uh no hanging chance hanging
00:08:08.920chance you're mixing it with dingleberries right uh okay i want to make us make sure my numbers
00:08:16.280are matching yours dave uh i've got 105 electoral actually maybe we'll just quickly stop uh nigel0.93
00:08:23.240why don't you just really kind of high level give us the cole's notes on the electoral college0.81
00:08:27.960because i think a lot of canadians don't understand that yeah it's it's a unique
00:08:34.360system to the united states so every state has a certain number of delegates who will vote for the
00:08:40.840president according to what the uh what the popular vote is the electoral college is not set
00:08:47.080in stone as the population of a state increases so will the number of votes in their electoral
00:08:53.480college, but it just sort of smooths out the process from the popular vote, which some
00:09:00.280people think is a good thing, and obviously, if you're on the losing end, you think it's
00:09:03.920a terrible thing, but what we're looking, when you see these numbers down the side,
00:09:11.120and it's 270 to win, that's not seats in Congress, not seats anywhere. It is electoral college
00:09:19.400votes. Okay, let me explain. Nico, let's pull up my screen here with the map. I'll flip this
00:09:26.020out a little, just a little bit more. The number of electoral college votes that a given state gets
00:09:31.340is based on its number of delegates to Congress. So every state has two senators. So at a minimum,
00:09:39.080every state has two electoral college votes, plus it's one House of Representative vote.
00:09:47.240So if you look in this little corner here, tiny Vermont, three, that means they have one member of the House of Representatives, because they're a small population, and two senators.
00:09:59.580So that's really the minimum that a state can have.
00:10:02.400District of Columbia has three, but it has no senators.
00:10:05.700It has only members in the House of Representatives.
00:10:14.280So that means California has 52 members of Congress, sorry, members of the House of Representatives, and it has two senators, therefore, 54 electoral college votes.
00:10:26.300It's actually fairly simple, and it was part of the original bargain to create, you know, it might be on the Articles of Confederation, you know, creating the American Constitution that we know now post-revolution.
00:10:37.960That was kind of a part of the deal, balancing big states and small states.
00:10:41.920Okay, well, we've got a good and growing audience here.
00:10:48.720Before we go to our first guest, Brian Lee Crowley,
00:10:50.680I just want to make sure our numbers are on par here.
00:17:15.980We're not talking about winning the absolute majority in these groups.
00:17:21.040We're talking about swing from Democrats to Republicans,
00:17:26.560which is much stronger than I think anybody predicted.
00:17:32.240And so if this is borne out across the United States, what this will mean is quite likely in very tight states, especially the swing states that we are all familiar with, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia, North Carolina, et cetera, et cetera, that where where tiny shifts may make the difference right now is to Trump.
00:17:57.560that's really interesting brian and i i wonder when we see these unexpected switches what's
00:18:08.440causing it what did we miss the first time around um what do you think is going on
00:18:16.600well you see i i i think there's always a true tremendously important subterranean dimension to
00:18:23.400politics uh you know we we put a lot of emphasis on what the pollsters are telling us for example
00:18:30.120because the pollsters are busy talking to voters or at least potential voters uh but the question
00:18:35.960you then always have to ask yourself is uh who are pollsters talking to and are the people they
00:18:41.800they're talking to telling them the truth if for example trump voters feel that uh the powers that
00:18:49.160be in their society don't approve of voting for Trump and they think that pollsters represent
00:18:56.760say the mainstream media or you know the large newspapers the television networks or whatever
00:19:03.240and they don't trust them they might well not reveal their preferences to pollsters and the
00:19:11.800the result of this is that you know we get all caught up in oh there's a scientific method in
00:19:17.800determining uh you know how people are going to vote and so on it all depends on whether you can
00:19:22.680get the the right people to give you the right information and i i think that there's that
00:19:29.560uh polling has always underestimated the strength of donald trump i don't think that's any different
00:19:34.680this time around uh and in fact uh after uh all the court cases and you know attacks on uh on
00:19:44.760trump and his credibility and his character some of which are justified don't get me wrong uh but
00:19:50.760the people who are committed to trump uh i think many of them have said you know this is not
00:19:58.440something i'm going to share with anybody uh i'm not going to tell pollsters i'm just going to go
00:20:03.880into the polling booth and mark my ballot and you know you look at how for example uh barack obama
00:20:11.800really condescended to black voters and basically you know he he told them that hey if if you don't
00:20:21.360vote for the democratic candidate somehow you're you're letting down the side and i actually think
00:20:28.140that this has uh harmed uh the standing of the democrats with a number of people in uh in the
00:20:35.760black community who say, I don't need Barack Obama to tell me how to vote.
00:20:42.620Brian, do you think that there was one particular moment when the whole thing started to swing?
00:20:48.680I mean, there are various candidates. It could have been the debate between Trump and Biden,
00:20:54.120but of course they fixed Biden. It could have been when Trump got shot. It could have been a
00:20:59.940number of things. Is there one that stands out to you as when you thought people are going to
00:21:04.460people are going to move now well you see i i i'm a bit of a betting man i i i don't hesitate to bet
00:21:14.460uh at least on elections and um i i was i was calling this election for trump
00:21:22.120months ago i i actually don't think that there's been a huge shift i think what's happened over
00:21:30.840course of the campaign is a number of people were confirmed in the way that they were already leaning
00:21:36.680i i think uh you know the democrats tried to get rid of joe biden tried to distance themselves from
00:21:44.440uh the biden legacy uh and yet chose his vice president who's got to wear
00:21:52.040the the results of the biden presidency there's no way she can escape them
00:21:56.040uh he he named her the person that had top responsibility for the border the
00:22:02.920control of the border and immigration is one of the top of mind issues for american voters
00:22:08.360uh i i just think kamala harris in retrospect is going to turn out to have been a very poor
00:22:15.240choice of candidate for the uh for the democrats and i i think all of this simply confirmed
00:22:21.320the way that the bulk of Americans were leaning heading into the campaign. I don't think there's
00:22:31.320been a moment when there's been a huge shift. I think everything over the course of the campaign
00:22:36.900has simply confirmed in people's minds what they were already thinking heading into the campaign.
00:22:42.240Okay. Well, interesting. That's what some of us were thinking.
00:22:46.860and and derek i'm going to tell you that ap ap has called ohio for trump
00:22:52.600ap has called ohio for trump yeah so uh well that's a big one here let's uh nico let's bring
00:22:59.700up the map here uh i'm gonna do my my wish.com version of wolf blitzer um so uh ohio on the
00:23:09.800map that is a must win for trump i that doesn't mean uh he's gonna win but if he did not win
00:23:16.260ohio i do not think he was going to win uh trump taking ohio that's that's a big one cory so yeah
00:23:22.600this is going to be another rust belt election i guess the way they put it right i mean that's
00:23:26.620really kind of the battleground zone you still got michigan wisconsin some of those areas that
00:23:30.720might be in flux as well but i mean ohio is a pretty positive sign i guess if it's going to
00:23:34.940be called wouldn't it be i i completely agree with derek i i just can't see trump winning
00:23:43.060without Ohio. And remember that J.D. Vance is a senator from Ohio.
00:23:51.200I think he's come out of this election rather well. I think he's established himself as a
00:23:57.420national political figure now. He has a big following in that state. Ohio has been trending
00:24:03.100republic. It used to be a very finely balanced state, very much a toss-up. It's leaning more
00:24:12.280and more Republican, a bit like Florida.
00:24:14.040Florida used to be such a toss-up state, not so anymore.
00:24:19.000And I've always thought that Ohio was going to go for Trump.
00:24:23.240I think the real question marks remain Michigan and Pennsylvania principally.
00:31:52.080No, no, I mean, this is a long night ahead of us yet,
00:31:54.240but it's for an early start in those Eastern votes,
00:31:56.420and a lot of them coming in, it is looking quite promising.
00:31:59.280I mean, we're not seeing things flipping back and forth.
00:32:01.880Where they're going his way, they're going definitively his way.
00:32:04.960Again, there's some big population centers that could come in late.
00:32:07.300Like I said, Georgia is an interesting one you watch.
00:32:09.820You know, it looks great, looks great until Atlanta starts bringing their votes in.
00:32:12.620And then all of a sudden, the state starts leading pretty strongly blue.
00:32:16.440So it's hard to read too much in early.
00:32:18.380But when you look at Ohio being called and, again, some of those areas through there, it's looking promising earlier than, yeah, I would have imagined.
00:32:26.120Ohio and North Carolina, those are two swing states.
00:32:29.220and uh ohio called north carolina i think dave said it's that's 270 to win i haven't seen it
00:32:36.560on a major network yet uh uh but it if he's got those two then yeah there's there's not a lot of
00:32:44.020big states that my feelings are saying it's going that are in flux to change that you know i mean
00:32:48.980sure you get some of the nevada and it's arizona and areas that might change out west but there's
00:32:53.720not a lot of votes within those states so yeah not gonna make much difference nico nico let's
00:32:59.080pull up the map here. So leaning or called for Trump, 256 electoral college votes. And those
00:33:11.880ones that, you know, I'm still just not convinced of North Carolina yet. I got to wait for a major
00:33:17.240network on that one. I'm going to take that one out. But let's take it out. The ones that are
00:37:00.440so that is uh something i'm watching too uh arizona closes in about 20 minutes here so we'll
00:37:08.020see how that goes but yeah like early returns it it does feel like uh something similar to what we
00:37:14.820went through in 2016 where we had uh it was more shocking then but if you look at the polls and in
00:37:22.760the and the spreads between what the polls were in 2016 and what the election result is you would
00:37:27.840Almost this this shouldn't surprise anybody.
00:37:30.520And I think one of your earlier guests was talking about how the polls seem to underestimate the Republicans.
00:37:37.900And I think that's what we're seeing here. Again, it's early in the night.
00:37:41.560We're still polls haven't closed even in Arizona yet.
00:37:44.700But so far, I do. I am feeling pretty good.
00:37:48.360So a quick update. Our newsrooms informed me that Calgary born Ted Cruz has been reelected to his seat representing Texas in the United States Senate.
00:38:03.800He was facing a fairly strong challenger in that. One thing a Canadian audience needs to understand is Americans, with the very notable exception of the U.S. Democratic presidential nominee, actually America has a Democratic nomination process, very much unlike Canada.
00:38:23.420In Canada, it's an extremely party-controlled process with just members voting.
00:38:28.300The rules can be kind of rigged here and there to favor who the party brass want.
00:38:32.500Party brass in America have some say over the primaries, but not anything like in Canada.
00:38:37.840And so you can actually get like a fairly conservative Democrat running in a red state or a fairly liberal Republican running in a blue state.
00:46:29.220We'll call it when the networks call it, but Iowa is going to go Trump.
00:46:34.100I'm looking at one Iowa map that says 20% reporting, and it says Harris is leading by seven points.
00:46:41.480I mean, I would imagine, but it depends what parts of the state it's coming from.
00:46:45.300Iowa is a, it's not the deepest of red states, but it's a fairly red state.
00:46:51.040We do have some results coming in from Georgia with 77% votes cast, Trump at 52.3%, Harris 47%. So he's got the lead in Georgia.
00:47:05.300Okay. That is a huge one. Georgia is a fairly big state, just 16 electoral college votes. That's kind of an upper mid-level size state for electoral colleges.
00:47:19.020uh i think biden won that vote i think it was something like 11 000 votes it was something
00:47:25.580extraordinarily close for a for a fairly big state um but again we're gonna have to watch
00:47:30.640what part of the state are those votes coming from are we gonna have to watch if if trump
00:47:36.420takes georgia and ohio and north carolina i mean it's it's a very clear path from there pretty
00:47:43.000much on his way at that point yeah yeah and those are the ones that a lot of people were saying were
00:47:47.280must, you know, those were the bellwether ones
01:01:01.860So Acosta at CNN says they have several days to work that out. So yeah, Nevada. Now, maybe Nevada isn't going to be material. It's only six electoral college votes. It could be material. But if it comes down to Nevada, I mean, holy hell, it really hopefully does.
01:01:20.400Yeah, that's it. So it's unlikely it comes down to Nevada. But yeah, I, I suppose, you know, like my handwriting is a lot messier than my parents. Handwriting gets messier with generations as we stop writing entirely. But yeah, I guess maybe, you know, newer voters today just don't even know how to do a signature.
01:01:39.920I guess they never have to sign a check. So that's probably what that's about. I see we've got Mr. Hankinson.
01:21:12.760of nine outstanding counties in Georgia
01:21:18.460uh that have not yet been counted are rural and those are likely to go for trump so eric we've
01:21:25.200we've now got more than half the votes counted in arizona 52 percent of the votes uh now counted
01:21:32.200harris out into the lead 50.2 percent sorry 50.2 percent to trump's 49 percent sorry in arizona
01:21:41.620Arizona. So it seems about 15,000 votes ahead in Arizona.
01:21:46.400Okay, so Arizona, what have we got for reporting so far? 52%. Okay. I mean, based on tonight's trends, I would find it extremely difficult to believe Arizona is going to go blue. That would be massively bucking a national trend. It's a light red state, and the toss-ups tend to be leaning red.
01:22:40.420there's a lot of votes left to come in. I think Arizona, along with a bunch of other states,
01:22:46.340was just such a razor-thin margin that it was a coin flip, even for the experts on this one.
01:22:52.500And I don't count myself among those who know every county of Arizona backwards.
01:22:59.460In 2020, Trump enjoyed a 2.2% plurality, according to the numbers that I was
01:23:07.220really too um so that would represent a quite a shift as that held also i'm looking at the counties
01:23:13.940here uh flagstaff phoenix tucson uh the blue areas of the state the major centers they have reported
01:23:22.580um there are one two three four five six seven eight counties not yet reporting uh that are
01:23:29.620mostly more rural so i i would be really shocked if harris's early lead in uh in arizona was to hold
01:23:39.620up okay so if we may mr hankinson can we come back to the issue of how there's actually two
01:23:46.740things which kamala harris is obviously forgiven by a lot of people one is the fact that she was
01:23:54.260the so-called borders are and yet huge number nobody's really knows for sure i don't think
01:24:01.460of illegal aliens were allowed to cross the border in that three and a half years period
01:24:06.580somehow that's not considered to be something she should answer for and nor is the fact that she
01:24:12.820kept the the secret about mr biden's poor health and of course question arises who was actually
01:24:21.220running the country at that time because it doesn't actually seem like she would have been
01:24:25.300likely or capable to do it. What do you think? Why are people letting her off?0.90
01:24:32.580Well, I don't know if Canadians, I know many of you live close to the border and watch some US
01:24:39.380channels and have an idea of what our news coverage is like. Newspapers sell fewer and
01:24:46.420and fewer copies. But the bias in this country in favor of Democrats in the national media,
01:24:53.260in academia, is simply extraordinary. They've done surveys. NPR recently, a guy who left there
01:24:59.580said out of 87 editors at National Public Radio in Washington, D.C., there were 87 Democrats and
01:25:06.780not one Republican. It's almost as bad in the New York Times, the LA Times, the Washington Post,
01:25:13.140CBS, NBC, ABC, all of the national media. So that's the answer to why she gets a pass.
01:25:19.780They desperately want her to get elected and they desperately don't want Trump to get elected.
01:25:24.900You look at the New York Times or the Post every day and you take a snapshot of the articles on
01:25:29.780the front page, it will be without doubt 10 articles, nine attacking Trump, one supporting
01:25:37.860or applauding Harris or before her Biden. I mean, just to give two examples, recently,
01:25:43.860there was the 60 Minutes program, which used to be a very respected news show, where they edited
01:25:51.060Harris's answer to a question. She has this reputation for word salads. She will just say1.00
01:25:56.660a bunch of words in response to a question that don't make a whole lot of sense. And so in order
01:26:00.860to make the answer to this question about Netanyahu and Israel sound more cogent, they replaced
01:26:06.080answer A with answer B, and they never released the transcript, the full transcript of the show,
01:26:11.740which they almost always do. And another example is in the debate against Trump,
01:26:16.660where she did quite well. She stuck to her talking points. She was fact-checked about
01:26:21.920zero times, and Trump was fact-checked, often erroneously, multiple times in the middle of
01:26:27.560the debate by David Muir from ABC in a way that was clearly designed or ended up giving her
01:26:35.500pronouncements more weight than his. So essentially she has had a sort of Cinderella run and it's not
01:26:42.180quite midnight during this entire campaign where she's not held accountable for her previous
01:26:47.100positions. She's never done. Trump was on Joe Rogan. It's like a three hour interview or J.D.
01:26:52.740Vance did Joe Rogan. But Kamala Harris could never do a show of that length because at some point1.00
01:26:58.140she would be asked to defend a previous position or asked to explain some sort of dichotomy or,
01:27:05.100you know controversy that that she simply couldn't well that's a i thought you might
01:27:13.660say something like that but i wanted to hear it from somebody on your side of the border because
01:27:18.300that certainly is the way that we that we tend to observe it up here unless you watch fox news
01:27:26.140you will not get a different point of view anywhere in the u.s media it seems to us
01:27:35.100That said, do you have any theories on the decision-making process within the White House during the last couple of years?
01:27:45.260Well, there were a few journalists who had the courage to point out that President Biden just simply wasn't the man he was in 2020, let alone 2016.
01:27:57.920I mean, if you watch a speech of Biden, he's had a 50-year career as a politician.
01:28:03.760He's never been the sharpest knife in the drawer.
01:28:06.620He's not a great intellectual heavyweight.
01:28:09.160He was caught lying about his being at the top of his class in law school and when he
01:28:13.580ran for president back in 1988, I think it was.
01:28:17.200But he was able to articulate his opinions.
01:28:20.180He was able to answer questions, to make a joke, had a very folksy style.
01:28:23.800And as the years wore on, anyone watching him could see that he was sort of falling back on some very basic, you know, jokes and talking points and responses and ticks, you know, like, come on, man.
01:28:35.960And I'm not kidding. And it's no joke. And a few journalists dared to point it out, but to the detriment of their careers.
01:28:42.520So I suspect that usually the vice president has no role in the White House. That's an old joke in the United States. And Biden and Harris weren't known to be particularly close. He chose her for cold, calculating political reasons and not because they had any kind of personal bond.
01:29:00.240So I think it was the, you know, the younger, hardcore intellectual lefties around President Biden, his advisors who were really running the policy.
01:29:12.160And I think that partly explains why a man who was elected on a promise of being sort of a moderate Democrat who just keep the ship of state sailing straight so he could have a real election four years later, just steered it sharply to the left on immigration, on race, on gender, on taxes, on spending, and just about everything else.
01:30:06.320Okay. I want, I'm looking at 270 and I see a very big call right now. Let's, let's go to Dave in the newsroom. Dave, I'm looking at, Dave, you've got to deal with that dinging.
01:34:21.000So now that Trump has taken Georgia, things get a lot easier at this point.
01:34:27.340So let's pay attention to this, ma'am.
01:34:29.800Let's try and zoom it in a little here.
01:34:32.000Okay. So at this point, you need 270 to win. Trump is at 242 confirmed, 20 leaning. I'm inclined to think the way this night's going, all those leaning are going to be Republican. It's all down to those 50 toss-ups right now.
01:34:50.200So Trump only needs eight to win. He can win only one more state, any one more genuine battleground state other than Nevada, and he wins.
01:35:05.400Now, because look, Nevada here, Nevada gets them to 268, too short. So Nevada does not get them there. So Nevada, at this point, sorry, Nevada, you don't matter.
01:39:52.140Harris does have a lead, 51.5% to 46.7% for Harris over Trump.
01:39:57.580But really early. Maybe, maybe she gets it. Pennsylvania. Trump. So 59% reporting estimated. Trump leading 50.8 over Harris's 48.2. If Trump wins any one of those three, he is president. Any one. She has to win all three.
01:40:22.520So at this point in the math, Nevada doesn't count.
01:40:25.580I'm sorry, Nevada, you're out of the race.
01:40:30.680Maybe someone else is going to see something that I don't.
01:42:37.000Now, was it the unity team when he got together?
01:42:40.720A group of people who, unlike him, were immediately likable.
01:42:46.080Tulsi Gabbard, Elon Musk, RFK Jr., make America healthy again,
01:42:51.900brought on the appeal hugely to folks who, if they didn't relate to Trump,
01:42:58.540they could at least relate to J.D. Vance or to Tulsi Gabbard.
01:43:04.760And all of a sudden, people, okay, taken together, that's a better crew.
01:43:09.520And there was the other thing about the Democrats.
01:43:12.920What a sad, and I don't mean sad in the way we sometimes use it as an insult,
01:43:19.660but they were so downbeat and so serious and always talking about we have to save democracy,
01:43:27.220Trump went out there and he made people laugh.
01:43:29.980But it was actually a fun thing to go to a Trump rally, whereas going to a Harris rally was something you did because you had to cover it.
01:43:42.560Guys, the New York Times prediction is now 84% Trump as president.
01:43:51.140The Times isn't eager to have to say that.
01:43:53.560I remember, I don't remember the exact numbers.
01:43:57.160You know, maybe Simon, I see Simon sitting there. Simon says, let's bring Simon in. Simon, I don't know if you remember the exact numbers, but I remember the New York Times election predictor.
01:44:11.580You know, it looked like a pressure gauge between Hillary and Trump.0.91
01:44:16.740And I think going into Election Day, it was something like it was in almost certainty.
01:44:23.740Hillary Clinton was going to smoke Trump in a landslide.1.00
01:44:27.620And then you saw it, you know, a little bit of life as it dicked up, up, up, up, up.
01:44:32.340And then, you know, you'd watch CNN, MSNBC, and then, you know, some of the independents like Young Turks.
01:44:38.220And, you know, you'd see heads explode in real time.
01:44:40.780I remember someone said it to a piece of music once.
01:52:50.800Well, I know Elon tried to make a go of Dogecoin, which is hilarious because the Department of Government, what is it, accountability or I don't know.
01:53:01.480So, man, Elon Musk in cabinet, that's going to be lit.
01:53:07.140I mean, I can never remember Milo or whatever.
01:53:10.440What's the name of the Argentine president?
01:55:19.120So bringing back to the big map here, any one of those three battleground states you see there in kind of an ugly, pukey beige, I'll call it, pukey beige, if Trump wins any one of those three, he's president.
01:55:37.000Gentlemen, all right, let's take the map down.
01:55:39.680Gentlemen, he's going to win one of those three.
02:03:19.480I thought there was going to be lots of what Americans call split ticket voting, where
02:03:23.540people voted Harris for president and then Republicans for Senate and House.
02:03:29.260That's not, in other words, they were going to hedge their bets.
02:03:31.640You preempted me. I was looking forward to trying to rub it in your face, but you just got right ahead of it. I saw that from you. Yeah, Republican House, Republican Senate, but Kamala Harris is president. Are you feeling what we're feeling, that that's not the case tonight?
02:03:52.220Yeah. Obviously, I thought I thought there was going to be enough late breaking support for Harris that she was going to win a clear electoral college majority.0.89
02:04:04.000That's obviously not going to happen. The so-called blue wall states, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, still too close to call.
02:04:13.100You guys, I think, have it right that if she's in trouble, she needs to carry all three plus keep Nevada.
02:04:19.900or if she doesn't have Nevada, then get, what is it, Arizona.1.00
02:04:24.160But it's going to be very close, which I think is a bit unfortunate.
02:06:04.880Although, again, right now they're all too close to call.
02:06:09.74048 hours ago, I thought Harris was going to carry at least, leaving Nevada out, at least two, if not all three, of the so-called blue wall states.
02:06:20.580Maybe she still will, but certainly not clear that she will.
02:06:27.780So, Ted, you weren't quite sure about that.
02:06:31.920What do you think might have gone wrong?
02:08:26.800I think I wrote that in the piece that I shared with you.
02:08:29.720But I thought that would weigh less negatively on her than the negatives on Trump.
02:08:37.940And I think my impression is wrong that the negative impression the more Americans have seen of her, the less they've liked her may tip the balance.
02:08:50.560Although, again, remains to be seen in these so-called blue wall states.
02:08:54.920The big change, and again, this is from somebody that's taught American politics, you know, up at the U of C for almost 40 years. Historically, college educated and therefore more affluent Americans were pretty reliable Republican voters.
02:09:12.300And blue-collar, particularly blue-collar, white families were very reliable Democratic Party supporters.
02:09:23.040That's almost been turned 180 degrees in the last decade.
02:09:28.460And that represents a real change in American politics.
02:09:33.480And how that goes forward from here, I'm not sure.
02:09:39.060But a dramatic change from what would have still been the case even 15 years ago.
02:09:46.560I want to get way ahead of ourselves, way ahead of ourselves here to post-Trump.
02:09:53.200Let's say he wins tonight, which I'm looking at the New York Times election predictor, 88% chance of victory at this point.
02:10:04.320Estimating he's going to get 301 electoral votes, way more than he needs.
02:10:09.060And they're predicting he's going to get some of those blue wall states.
02:10:13.500Yeah, absolutely. And predicting he actually wins the popular vote by one point one percent, which would be the first Republican.
02:10:20.000I could be wrong, but Republicans generally don't often win the popular vote.
02:10:25.460You know, often enough win the Electoral College, but that he'll actually win the popular vote by more than a percent, which is the first time since 88.
02:10:33.680I could. That would be that would be significant.
02:10:36.780I'd be very, very, very unpredicted in the surprise.
02:10:41.140Yeah. So let's say that happens, because we know we know the New York Times isn't pulling for this result.
02:10:48.900If they're saying it, they must grudgingly believe it. Let's look ahead four years.
02:10:55.140J.D. I actually just a moment of silence for Generation X.
02:10:59.080There's never been a Generation X candidate for president or vice president.
02:11:03.420and Trump just totally skipped Generation X
02:11:07.580and went straight to a millennial with J.D. Vance.
02:11:12.240How do you think J.D. Vance has come out of this?
02:11:14.400And do you think, because he's in the very fortunate position
02:11:17.620of only having to cool his heels for one term
02:11:20.380before he gets his shot at the brass ring.
02:11:24.900How do you think J.D. Vance is going to shape up out of this,
02:11:28.520perhaps as both a generational leader and as the,
02:11:31.500a candidate with the inside track, at least, for the Republican nomination four years from now?
02:11:38.120Depending on how the next four years go, he potentially is the inside, would have the inside
02:11:43.840track. I read his book, was it four or five years ago? I thought it was pretty interesting,
02:11:50.700and it began to explain the shift that I was just talking about of blue-collar white families
02:11:55.820leaving the Democrats and going to going over to the Republicans.
02:12:01.740And I think other than his he got in trouble for what what was his comment about single single women, cat ladies, single cat ladies or something.
02:12:12.300Yeah, that was that was rather unfortunate politically.
02:12:16.100But other than a few missteps like that, I think he's actually been a much more articulate defender of kind of the Republican agenda than Donald Trump.
02:12:27.440Let's face it, Donald Trump's not that interested in public policy.
02:13:36.720I would say in his original four years, he had some very, a lot of people stepped forward to help him.
02:13:44.060If you look at his first cabinet, very interesting group of people, all who had very successful careers and were willing to step forward and help Donald Trump.
02:13:56.760About half of them have now campaigned against him, right?
02:14:00.260because they found his judgment, his egotism, his impetuousness to be dangerous.
02:14:10.840And so that was certainly a very negative factor in my assessment.
02:14:17.780As I said in that piece, I think from my own experience in politics,
02:14:22.840policy is important, but judgment and character are important too.
02:14:26.460I think Trump scores poorly on both judgment and character.
02:14:30.260So if you take any confidence from the Unity team, you know, we've got RFK, Elon Musk, J.D. Vance, Tulsi Gabbard, does the fact that people like that have decided to help him get where he's going to get give you any ease?
02:14:47.400No, no, I would go more. I trust people that have been in the same room with him more than people that haven't. And there's a pretty impressive list of ex cabinet ministers that are very, very negative. So, but obviously, I hope I'm wrong. I hope they're wrong if he ends up winning. So we'll see.
02:15:08.660I think one of my big concerns, one of my big concerns is internationally, the United States is still de facto the leader of the free world.
02:15:18.820The free world right now is very much under attack, not just in Eastern Europe, in Ukraine, not just in the Middle East and Israel.
02:15:32.240North Korea and China are threatening, South Korea and Japan.0.77
02:15:36.900Again, Iran, Russia, and China are obviously all working together, funding one another, helping one another.
02:15:47.080American leadership there is critical.
02:15:49.720I'm a little worried about what kind of team Trump is going to have around him if he's the president to deal with that.
02:15:57.620Back on the domestic policy side, I think one of the interesting takeaways, and this has relevance in Canada for Daniel Smith in Alberta, and I think nationally for Pierre Poirier and the next federal election here, it's pretty clear there's a huge negative reaction from the middle of the voting class, the middle class,
02:16:22.600against the anti-family stuff that's coming out of the woke DEI movement.
02:16:30.860And I think that has ended up, that may be partly explaining why Trump has done so well here.
02:16:38.180And I think it may explain why. Well, you saw the big positive vote that Danielle got on the weekend from from the from at the AGM.
02:16:53.120Partly that was, I think, for standing up for Alberta and challenging on the energy policy, climate tradeoffs and so forth.
02:16:59.240But partly, I think it's standing up for parents' rights, protecting kids against things that were being brought into the schools that were going to be harmful.
02:17:12.240So I think that's happened in the U.S.
02:17:15.860There's a reaction against that, and that could splash over, spill over into Canadian.
02:17:21.580I think it actually already has spilled over into Canadian politics.
02:17:24.600Look at the first index in my new book, and I talk about that.
02:17:33.320So I just wonder if another factor that might have happened, though, was, I mean, Trump is a known quantity now, too.
02:17:40.180I mean, when you've got a new candidate, no matter who it is, you can play the hidden agenda.
02:17:43.560You can talk about apocalyptic predictions, which there were before he ran the first time.
02:17:48.140And as opposed to his inner circle, as you said, who found him to be a man of poor judgment and poor character.
02:17:52.800But the public at large didn't see these shifts or they weren't looking at nuanced foreign policy.
02:17:58.580So when looking against the almost unknown, you know, woke opposition, they might feel like Trump isn't so bad.
02:18:06.100They might not like him. He might be bombastic and not even that personable.
02:18:09.720But they know who he is and he isn't necessarily going to end the world, even if some people are acting as if it would.
02:18:15.340And again, I'd separate foreign policy from domestic policy, but on the domestic front, the kind of woke DEI, racist, homophobic, sexist, colonialist, all that stuff, that was still kind of, it was there in 2020, but it was a little below the surface.
02:18:38.640Now it's out there big time. And I think the negative reaction against that is getting bigger and bigger from just normal families, normal people.
02:18:48.120The United States, the United States had slavery. There are aboriginal issues in the U.S.
02:18:54.460But still, if you step back and look, Canada, the US, I'd go on and say Australia, compared to the rest of the world, the last 10,000 years, we're better off in terms of security, safety, prosperity, health, equality, all of those things, much, much better off than all the other alternatives.
02:19:21.240So I think the woke DEI, that crusade, I think, is now backfiring badly.
02:19:29.100I think that help explains what may be happening today.
02:19:32.760And I think that is also beginning to happen.
02:19:35.700We see in Saskatchewan, Alberta, and a couple of the maritime provinces.
02:23:44.040Let's bring in Simon Hankinson from New Hampshire of the Heritage Foundation, leading American conservative think tank.
02:23:53.680Ted Morton, former Alberta finance minister slash treasurer and also dual citizen of the United States in Alberta.
02:24:04.120We'll just have a bit more of a maybe a broad open discussion here.
02:24:10.040Let's let's get the map. Actually, let's get the map.
02:24:14.040up there, uh, use this one here. Um, so, uh, both gentlemen, um, there are still four toss-up
02:24:24.420states. Arizona could theoretically go blue, but I just, I'm, I'm, I'm looking at it. It's,
02:24:31.920it's highly improbable, highly, highly improbable. Uh, Trump's at a hundred and,
02:24:36.180sorry, 242, sorry, 262, uh, called or leaning. Paris is at 226 called or leaning 50 toss-ups
02:24:46.340still there. Um, uh, as we were, we were discussing earlier, uh, Nevada probably doesn't
02:24:53.220matter unless Arizona does something crazy. Um, Trump just needs one of the three blue wall
02:24:59.000states that are remaining. He either needs Wisconsin and he wins on Wisconsin alone,
02:25:04.600Michigan, he could win on Michigan alone. Pennsylvania, he could win on Pennsylvania alone.
02:25:12.960Look, and now we finally got this working. We've got the New York Times live presidential forecast.
02:25:20.380It has Trump at an 89% chance of winning. He has a range of 255 to 329 electoral college votes as an estimate.
02:25:34.600And it is estimating him right now to be the first Republican since I was a toddler to win the popular vote, which would be an astounding feat if he actually pulls it off.
02:25:51.760So let's keep the map up, but maybe just kind of move it to the side for now.
02:25:57.220Do you guys, maybe I'll stop with you, Simon, and then the same question to Ted.
02:26:04.600Do you see any realistic path to Kamala Harris winning right now as the map stands?
02:28:10.500But the Pennsylvania case is interesting, I think, for Alberta and for Canada, because, as you guys may know,
02:28:18.940but I think most Canadians, most Albertans wouldn't know.
02:28:21.560Now, oil and gas, well, actually not oil, gas has become a big part of the Pennsylvania economy with directional drilling and new technologies that make previously unrecoverable gas recoverable, just what we're doing here as well.
02:28:42.460So, and the anti-energy, in the name of climate change, the anti-energy, anti-pipeline policies
02:28:53.060of Biden and Harris, I think may explain partly what's happened in Pennsylvania.
02:28:58.720And going forward again, thinking about Canada-U.S. relations, I think a Biden, excuse me, a Trump
02:29:07.920presidency will be more supportive of cooperating with Canada on energy security.
02:29:17.520And Trump worries me a little bit because, as you know, and we all know that he's a bit of
02:29:24.700a protectionist, and that potentially complicates NAFTA or whatever US, whatever the new form of
02:29:32.200NAFTA is called, could complicate that. But on energy, which is critical, not just Alberta,
02:29:37.180for the whole Canadian economy, I think it explains the reaction against the anti-energy.
02:29:45.200The only thing that counts is climate change approach of Biden and Harris. That's backfired,
02:29:50.940I think, in Pennsylvania. And particularly if we have a Republican Congress, we're certainly
02:29:56.400going to have a Republican Senate. The House is still open. We're going to be a much more
02:30:00.840balanced approach to figuring out how to balance climate change concerns with energy security
02:30:06.100and inflation and price, because oil and gas, it's not just about cars and heating.
02:30:19.400Everything that runs the modern economy runs on oil and gas.
02:30:23.560So that's a big part of the inflation factor.
02:30:28.420And again, one of the issues that's obviously hurting Harris a lot.
02:30:32.620Let me ask you for a very bold prediction. If Trump wins, does Keystone get built through both of your homes?
02:30:46.520Yeah, well, as all three of you know, I was not just a big Keystone supporter, but I worked hard to try to influence opinion on both sides of the border on Keystone.
02:30:59.280And on day one, the very first day of the Biden administration, he vetoed what Trump had approved.
02:31:09.800And I do a fair amount of hunting in the fall up in the central east part of Alberta.
02:31:20.520And all of the pipe that was supposed to be part of between Oyen and Concort,
02:31:25.360you could see what was supposed to be part of keystone was just left left on the ground there
02:31:29.680that was being built and uh that was a huge setback for the alberta economy huge setback
02:31:36.720for the canadian economy and uh again with the trans mountain new tmx expansion that's important
02:31:48.880Having Canada and Alberta completely dependent on U.S. markets, no industry is good being dependent just on one market.
02:31:56.960And we have been overly dependent on the U.S. market for oil and gas exports.
02:32:02.860Trans Mountain Expansion addresses that and begins to solve that.
02:32:06.140But the fact remains the United States is an ally both economically and strategically in global strategic affairs.
02:32:14.600Yes, I think, to get to your question, I think there's a very good chance that Keystone will and would come back.
02:32:23.780Quotation that you've all heard me use before, former governor of Montana said,
02:32:30.080you don't have to send the National Guard to Alberta to get the oil and gas into the American economy.
02:32:38.800Indeed. Okay, let's, well, Simon, here, let's bring up the side screen here. I want to see where you're at, Simon, here. New York Times still saying there's an 89%. I'll actually have to correct the record here. While we were sitting here, a friend of the Western Standard sent me a message saying I was not a toddler in 2004.
02:33:04.300uh bush uh versus carry uh bush did beat carry in the popular vote 50.7 to 48.3 so okay uh 2004
02:33:16.720so 20 years ago was oh my god that was 20 years ago oh 20 years ago was the last time a republican
02:33:23.820actually beat a democrat for the popular vote uh it's not done but it uh certainly looks uh very
02:33:32.140possible. Oh, actually, very quickly, before I come to you, Simon, you're going to be happy
02:33:39.400with this announcement, I'm sure, Ted. Let's bring in Dave from the newsroom here for a quick
02:33:46.560update on the Senate. Yeah, it looks like Republicans have retaken the Senate. They have
02:33:55.620flip seats in Ohio and West Virginia, and still Montana to come.
02:34:03.720So Ohio wasn't on my list. So that's interesting. So
02:46:58.100Actually, Simon, if you want to maybe pick up on my original question about what's Biden thinking,
02:47:04.220But also, if you care to retroactively prognosticate, if that's a thing, about how Biden, how do you think Biden would have would have fared tonight relative to Harris?
02:47:20.400No, I think Ted's right. I think Biden would have gone down in flames because his cognitive
02:47:27.480decline would have just been so obvious. We've seen him out in front of the cameras a few times
02:47:32.580in the past couple of weeks. Obviously, Harris wanted him out of sight because he was always a
02:47:38.720gaffe machine in his entire career, even when he was fully with it. But now the gaffes are coming
02:47:43.660thick and fast, and I don't think he's really aware of making them. I think this is a story
02:47:50.520of really hubris that, you know, Joe Biden, a man who had run for president several times and really
02:47:57.460had never had a shot, was only able to win it in 2020 because he ran a basement campaign during
02:48:03.580COVID and was going up against a man who was, while very popular with a minority of the country,
02:48:09.480extremely unpopular with an equally large minority, and Biden was able to attract enough
02:48:15.320swing votes to squeak a win. But then they put up Kamala Harris, who just frankly is not a good1.00
02:48:22.560candidate. I mean, she has never really won a contested race in her life. She is pretty far
02:48:28.540to the left of even the Democratic Party, you know, an Oakland, San Francisco, ultra-progressive
02:48:36.220with views that are just not compatible with mainstream America. And much as she tried to
02:48:41.800hide those views, I think they must have known the people, the James Carvilles, you know, I call them
02:48:46.800the old dogs of the party, they must have known that she was just not the candidate to run against
02:48:52.500Trump. And if they had run somebody else other than those two, they probably would have had a
02:48:57.900really good chance of winning. But the hubris in just assuming that the American people would
02:49:03.300swallow whoever they chose to put up against Trump just because they hated him so much
02:49:07.420was their downfall. I would agree. I would agree with that. She never, if there'd been a normal
02:49:16.940democratic primary process that started back in January, February, March, she never would have1.00
02:49:22.900won it. And whoever would have won it would have had a better chance against Trump. She has,
02:49:29.580the more people see of her the the less the less they like her i have to think that to
02:49:36.400derek's question about what biden is thinking right now it's really a question does did he
02:49:42.660dislike trump more than he dislikes harris and my bet would he probably did you heard the
02:49:50.760the garbage comment a week ago um how many votes that cost kamala harris who knows1.00
02:49:58.320But that was the bitterness that you sometimes see come out of Joe Biden.
02:50:06.580I suspect that he would rather have had, that he will not take any satisfaction from Donald Trump beating the usurper from within his own party.
02:50:50.060um uh let's uh actually you know who i know wants to get back in to this uh conversation
02:50:57.320is western standards uh stampede food critic uh josh andrus uh josh um uh you know while we're
02:51:08.660chatting here let's let's bring up the map nico um yeah i actually want to talk about the map
02:51:15.900i'm glad you brought it up i'm the map um arizona i have been watching very closely
02:51:24.940maricopa county which is where there was a lot of uh we'll call them conversations during the
02:51:32.9402020 election hasn't been reporting uh that is the seat of phoenix our phoenix would be the seat
02:51:40.700of maricopa county that is at 50.7 percent with the total of over a million point 1.1 million
02:51:50.220votes that's by far the largest county so i'm not as confident as everybody else on arizona
02:51:56.780well um yet well just before you go on there uh i want to show you this um
02:52:03.100Um, the, uh, yeah, so there are 52% of estimated votes coming in from, uh, Arizona.
02:52:11.540Trump has a razor thin lead, but it's only 53%, but he has a razor thin lead.
02:52:16.88049.79% to 49.41%, roughly, uh, just about 7,000 votes separating the two candidates.
02:52:27.360But let's look at this. The New York Times is saying Arizona still has an 80% chance of going Republican. It has a better chance of going Republican than Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, or Michigan, all of which are leaning fairly heavily Republican at this point.
02:52:47.220uh are you yeah are you telling me josh that you you think arizona's in play because the
02:52:55.300the democrats yeah i just i've got a bad or sorry i've got a bad feeling like just based on last
02:53:02.220time i seem to remember going to bed thinking that we had arizona and waking up in the morning
02:53:06.460and seeing that we didn't or not we the republicans so that's something that i've been watching
02:53:12.420yeah and then pennsylvania is the other one uh the philadelphia county delaware county
02:53:23.300montgomery county and bucks county all around there those report those numbers are trickling
02:53:30.480in too so i i understand why they haven't called the election yet or and i would hesitate to go
02:53:39.480there myself but it's it's looking pretty good like georgia should go oh well okay so i'll
02:53:49.980probe the new york times here georgia the new york times uh democrat paper extraordinaire
02:53:56.740saying it's a greater than 95 percent georgia uh georgia was i could be wrong but that may
02:54:03.900been the closest state on a percentage level uh maybe maybe even in uh in raw vote total popular
02:54:11.340vote total in the last election that was that was razor razor razor thin last time uh they're
02:54:18.680calling that pretty solidly for trump right now let's just let's yeah and i think that's like
02:54:24.140fulton county which is the seat of atlanta heavy democrat uh support that comes in there at 91
02:54:30.940percent expected to uh vote uh reporting that's the wall street journals got that that was the
02:54:37.840writing that caused some frustration in georgia so there's not much expected to come in from that
02:54:46.560county itself so hopefully i think georgia hold yeah you're just solid unless there's something
02:54:52.960crazy in the mail-in ballots but i just again i want like maricopa county i don't think
02:55:00.920gets moved in an hour. No, no. Maricopa County was reporting today. They could take up to like
02:55:09.640almost two weeks to counter or something crazy. I am not, I know some of our viewers are not going
02:55:19.720to agree with me on this one. I'm not a believer that the last election was stolen. I think it was
02:55:25.740some funny business here and there but probably not to move it but there is something funny with
02:55:31.380maricopa county like and i'm not saying it's even untoward i'm saying do they not know how to count
02:55:37.540do they not do math so good in maricopa county what what's the issue um
02:55:44.660uh maybe i'll put this also yeah go ahead uh maybe put this question to uh to both ted simon
02:55:53.420If you want to chime in. You know, I think there was a, you know, I really hate this term denialism.
02:56:02.720It's kind of comparing it to the Holocaust or something. I think it's a term in poor taste.
02:56:07.300But let's say folks willing to dispute the election even after it's been done, settled in the courts.
02:56:16.220Yeah, that was fairly prominent among a lot of Republican and Trump supporters in 2020.
02:56:21.360But there was a lot of that by Democrats in Clinton's quarter in 2016, where they claimed it wasn't fair and Putin swayed the election. And then you go back to Bush-Gore 2000, claiming that that election was stolen too.
02:56:38.620I mean, if it's decisive tonight, I don't expect Democrats to contest the legitimacy of it, at least that hard.
02:56:50.080But I'll put it to either of our two U.S. citizens on the panel.
02:56:56.820If tonight continues going the way it very much looks like it is, do you expect much in the way of, to use the Democrats' term, election denialism?
02:57:15.320I'm sure there will be all kinds of recriminations and legal challenges.
02:57:22.080But I guess it kind of depends on where the counts are the most delayed.
02:57:27.460I still don't understand why there are certain counties that can get it all done in certain states in record time.
02:57:35.900And there are others where it drags on for weeks.
02:57:37.460I know there are different rules about mail-in ballots and such.
02:57:40.580But, you know, if I were running Maricopa County, I would, after the last election, have made a huge effort to make sure that my operation was running like a well-oiled machine so that it instills some confidence in the next results.
02:57:54.440But I think it would be a terrible dynamic to get into where after each election, you know, we just started trying to undo it and pick apart the voting machines and the system itself.
02:58:06.180We have to have confidence in the system. And, you know, we saw what happened in Venezuela not so long ago when they had an election and the probable losing party just said, yeah, it never happened.
02:58:18.580And I know that's a long, long way down the road, but I don't think we should go even an inch further down that path.
02:58:26.540Ted, you can't wiggle off this question anymore.
02:58:28.440well i i certainly agree i i hope the democrats wouldn't do it but i think they'd have trouble
02:58:36.600doing it because the hypocrisy that's been one of their biggest uh biggest uh crusades against trump
02:58:44.600is his denialism for so for them to turn around and play the game that they've been criticizing
02:58:49.800the hypocrisy of that would i think a little bit hard to sustain
03:06:07.460I'll pass on the House, but on the Senate,
03:06:10.960the three races that Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania
03:06:15.880with the Republicans slightly doing worse than Trump,
03:06:21.540It could be the opposite of what I predicted was going to happen is that there were going to be a lot of people in the middle voting Harris for presidency and then using their Senate and their House votes to create a check on Harris by voting Republican.
03:06:39.380And maybe the opposite. I see I appear to have been wrong in thinking that Harris was going to enjoy some sort of last minute surge, but that her supporters were then going to vote Republican on the Senate and House seats.
03:06:54.440Maybe the opposite. Maybe the opposite is happening here. But as far as the split ticket voting goes, I did a little bit of research.
03:07:03.020By my account, five of the last 11 presidential elections, the party that won the presidency had lost both houses.
03:07:16.060So it's not uncommon for Americans to kind of split their ticket, hedge their votes and say, well, we're going to go with this party for the presidency, but we don't really like him or her that much.
03:07:26.860So we're going to vote for the other party in this House and the Senate.
03:07:36.220But what I'm saying is I don't have a ton of – I don't have the data at my fingertips because I'm in the middle of this.
03:07:42.840But what seems uncommon to me is that the Republicans already held the House and stand possibly to lose seats.
03:07:51.380Maybe they don't lose control of the House, but they stand to lose seats in the House.
03:07:56.620I mean, say the Democrats already had the House and Trump wins and the Democrats keep the House.
03:08:01.420That's not entirely uncommon that there's a split ticket there, but for a new party to come into the White House, but then to lose the House of Representatives, that would probably be a little less common.
03:08:14.500It's happened five of the last 11 elections.
03:08:19.000Well, my theory is obviously not too good.
03:08:24.320That's why we have some people living in America on the panel.
03:08:31.420Well, just my two cents on this, and I'm not as much of an expert as probably all of you on the mechanics of it.
03:08:40.520And there are people who make a living studying exactly how the House gets elected every year.
03:08:46.600And I know my friend, John Holzman, who makes predictions and actually seems to be getting this one right.
03:08:52.420The House was the hardest one for him to call. But I would just say a little local perspective is that sometimes these are these are well-known names.
03:09:01.420And they're people who are well-liked, even if maybe their party isn't as well-liked.
03:09:07.780So it can really come down to all politics is local rather than some kind of strategic decision to split the ticket, you know, to balance the power.
03:09:16.400And it can really, therefore, be pretty random year to year or election to election every two years as to what characters, what people you have running.
03:09:25.280And we see that in the Senate with these people like Manchin and Tester and Sherrod Brown, who had survived forever, largely on name recognition rather than voting record.
03:09:39.880And maybe that's true in the House, although I don't know the personalities.
03:09:44.440Well, just where Ted's sitting in Montana, Montana is a pretty deep red state looking right now.
03:09:51.220Trump is leading 63.4 to Harris, 33.7.
03:09:59.320I mean, geez, RFK is at 2% there, and he's well out of the race.
03:10:06.200It's a deep red state, but it has one of its two senators is a Democrat.
03:10:11.840And now that Democrat has gone down to defeat tonight.
03:10:17.540He's not defeated yet, but it looks like he's going to be defeated.
03:10:20.740Yeah, yeah. Very likely going down to defeat. But like, I mean, this is the equivalent of someone, let's say, under the Liberal Party of Canada banner getting elected in Brooks or Drumheller or Rocky Mountain House.
03:10:36.120it's we don't do that in canada uh but i think that's that might be largely a product at least
03:10:43.920to some extent of the u.s primary system where local people actually pick their candidate it's
03:10:48.500a lot less hand selected by the national i know i i know uh there is you know the rnc and the dnc
03:10:55.020have got their dirty hands in these things but you know there's a lot more independence to
03:10:59.840actually select your own candidate they can be a rogue on the right like ron paul they can be a
03:11:04.260Rogo on the left, like Bernie Sanders, but also the ability to select moderates who can actually
03:11:10.020win in areas where that party is otherwise weak. It's just something that wouldn't happen in
03:11:18.520Canada. You know, you get like a fairly conservative. It doesn't happen. It doesn't
03:11:23.720happen in part, though, because if you want whoever you want for to be the prime minister
03:11:28.780or the premier, you have to vote the party line to get that result. In the U.S., with the division
03:11:35.800between the executive vote and the legislative vote, you can hedge your bets. You can do one of
03:11:42.040each. Yeah. Okay. Well, let's check in with our newsroom, news editor, Dave Naylor. I see him
03:11:52.040scrolling away furiously in the newsroom. I haven't seen too much here, but I think we've
03:11:58.140So we'll check in with Dave right now.
03:12:02.760Not a lot new tonight at the moment, Derek.
03:12:07.260Interestingly, I've just seen a report that the United States Secret Service is going to be mobilizing a lot more agents heading down to Florida overnight.
03:12:15.900So I think they're obviously putting their bets in on it.
03:22:17.540For all the millennials and Gen X's and boomers who remember talking to Americans, it was a much more intellectual exercise than that tonight.
03:22:28.040But David Knightleg has been a senior member in the Alberta government, and I don't know how to describe you otherwise, other as an international businessman of mystery.
03:22:39.420There we go. That's a good description.
03:23:09.120I've been debating some friends of mine in the States.
03:23:10.820I went aggressive a week ago and I said, I think Trump could actually win all of the swing states and with 312 electoral votes.
03:23:22.760We'll see if that happens. But he's on track for it right now.
03:23:25.660I think also watch the Senate. The Republicans have already got a majority in the Senate.
03:23:31.660I think they could end up with 54 seats. 54.
03:23:34.660Yeah, I think there's some there. There are some very close races right now.
03:23:39.360Moreno just beat Sherrod Brown in Ohio. Sheehy will definitely win, win Montana.
03:23:46.880So, you know, it's just I think it's the Republican sweep. I think they'll also win the House.
03:23:51.520You know, the House would be very close. But I think that, you know, I said, you know, being
03:23:56.240aggressive, 312 electoral seats for the White House, 54 up to between 52 and 54 seats in the
03:24:03.360senate but definitely a senate majority and uh 220 to 224 seats in the house so i think uh the next
03:24:11.360president will be donald trump but i think he's going to go in with um a complete sweep and
03:24:17.440you're going to have two years of a very strong uh agenda and the the most interesting thing is
03:24:23.440i've sort of written about for the standard about this election was early on in the election the
03:24:29.920The Democrats decided when they appointed Harris that they would try and do everything they could.
03:24:35.340They were hugely funded, three times the, you know, treasury of the Trump campaign to make it a litigation on Donald Trump.
03:24:45.040And they were prosecuting that pretty successfully until he made this very unusual strategic turn and made it a unity ticket.
03:24:53.080And suddenly they found themselves needing to litigate RFK Jr., who's very appealing to suburban women.0.57
03:24:59.220They were litigating Nicole Shanahan, his running mate, who's very appealing to women in tech, and they were very focused on the health agenda, which appeals to independents.
03:25:10.380They ended up needing to litigate against Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, Tulsi Gabbard, most recently Ron Paul.
03:25:18.600And I think what happened is the attempt to make this election a referendum on Donald Trump instead of a referendum on the Biden-Harris years meant that they were unable to actually respond to the unity ticket strategy very effectively.
03:25:33.680and you saw this especially with the dominant dominance of podcasts and the most unbelievable
03:25:38.740example of that was the movement in the poll being up six points with young men under the age of 30
03:25:47.120at the very beginning of uh september to being down by five points and 11 points shift in that
03:25:55.780uh young male cohort by the end of october and you can attribute i believe almost all that to
03:26:01.860the effectiveness of podcasts, but also the attractiveness in that cohort of some of the
03:26:06.540members of this unity team. Very similar thing happened with women. So I think what you're
03:26:10.680seeing in some of these swing states, they get decided, you know, keep in mind, Biden only won
03:26:17.160last, you know, in 2020 by less than 45,000 votes across three swing states,
03:26:24.400finding ballots, counting them through the night for a couple of days, right? This is extremely
03:26:29.240close. Trump won because he won Michigan by 11,000 votes back in 2016. So I think that what
03:26:37.180happened was that Trump completely outplayed the Harris campaign in spite of their advantages on
03:26:42.720money. And in spite of, you know, prosecuting Trump's an easy thing to do, especially when
03:26:47.540you have the mainstream media. But if you can't control the podcast, which is the new media,
03:26:51.700which we're on right now, you don't have the intention. And I think that's what we're seeing
03:26:57.200So a couple of things to follow up on there, David. One of them you were explaining recently
03:27:03.520to me how every presidential campaign seems to have gone to the president who managed to
03:27:12.240get the new medium first. Could you lay that out for the viewers?
03:27:19.360Sure. Well, the most famous example of that, I mean, it started with FDR's dominance in radio.
03:27:27.200back in the 40s. But the most famous example of the way that a new medium can shift voter
03:27:33.240perceptions and with voter perceptions, especially in these very marginal, tight elections, one of
03:27:37.880the tightest elections in U.S. history was JFK versus Nixon. And this is the dawn of the television
03:27:44.600age. And JFK and Nixon had the first televised debate. And JFK's team very wisely had him prepared
03:27:51.560for this debate he'd shaved he put on makeup for the television medium which richard nixon thought
03:27:58.120was hilarious uh richard nixon showed up uh off the campaign trail sweaty five o'clock shadow
03:28:05.000did the tv debate and what makes this so interesting was at the time they polled people
03:28:10.120that had listened to that debate on radio and nixon won it hands down if you're a radio listener
03:28:15.400but if you saw the debate on tv you thought that jfk had won it and jfk went on to win that
03:28:22.920election very close election but many people attribute the shift in perception of him as a
03:28:28.920candidate to his dominance of the tv medium you know you you flip forward to uh ronald reagan
03:28:36.440dominated a new ability to target voters with very specific issue specific arguments using direct mail
03:28:45.400completely changed the game in the election in the 80s and brought out voters that they could
03:28:51.120appeal to by zip code with very specific issues. You saw Obama say Clinton with email, Obama with
03:28:58.860social media, Trump with Twitter. This year, it's been podcast. And the most unbelievable example of
03:29:07.080that is Donald Trump did the podcast with Joe Rogan. Kamala Harris did a podcast with
03:29:14.120um uh another podcaster um and and you know trump pulled over 40 million viewers in three days uh
03:29:27.560on the joe rogan podcast vance picked up the podcast afterwards if you look at kamala harris's
03:29:33.240very best showing on any media at all you're talking about maybe a couple million people
03:29:38.200uh she appeared on snl just two nights it violated an fcc regulation by doing that but1.00
03:29:45.000you know they just didn't understand the medium it didn't fit the errors campaign strategy
03:29:50.520which was a moderated very very scripted strategy of staying in the basement as as joe biden had
03:29:58.040and as a result she wasn't putting herself in places that podcasts take people which is if you're
03:30:03.000an independent you like to see a politician held up like rogan does for three hours and asked
03:30:09.240absolutely everything and you get a sense of who this person was when you look at the atlas intel
03:30:14.920which was the most accurate polling uh company in the 2020 election when you look at what they
03:30:22.120found with independence after trump had started this unity um ticket strategy independence said
03:30:29.560they understood what trump stood for they knew who he was and they knew what his policies were
03:30:34.120and they didn't understand that about harris this came up in multiple different questions and i
03:30:38.840think that one of the things that's happened with the voting population independents are now larger
03:30:43.400as a cohort and almost 40 percent than either republicans or democrats first time in history
03:30:48.600and they don't vote party they vote issues and if you're voting issues you want to hear about the
03:30:53.480issues you care about and if you can find people on podcasts see them ask the question by people
03:30:59.240that you trust uh who are the hosts you get a sense of their authenticity as a candidate and
03:31:04.360i i think that this new medium this new technology was game-changing and it benefited the trump
03:31:10.840campaign so let's just go ahead hold on before that i want to bring uh brian uh brian lee crowley
03:31:18.280in uh for this conversation yeah yeah for uh to follow on something that uh david knight lake said
03:31:24.120uh uh yeah bring brian in here uh i'm here yeah brian uh i i i'm sure you i i think you heard
03:31:33.480what david knightleg said about the unity ticket yeah and that that was really that's interesting
03:31:41.260it's uh i'm not saying it's never been done before in some form i mean you know candidates
03:31:47.100presidential candidates will balance themselves out with you know their vice presidential candidate
03:31:53.080normally. And that's kind of it. And then you'll have some surrogates out there. The Democrats,
03:32:00.220Kamala Harris picked a frumpy white guy from the Midwest. So that balances her off. Okay.
03:32:06.860But her surrogates were mostly just celebrities for the most part. But Trump built the so-called
03:32:14.740unity ticket. These big personalities who can kind of, for lack of a better term, narrow cast
03:32:22.480Elon Musk is almost futurism. You know, it's technology, it's free speech. He's kind of the
03:32:28.940anarcho-capitalist, short of Ron Paul, who they got on site, Tulsi Gabbard, RFK, etc.
03:32:37.460Could you elaborate on, you know, what do you think the effect of the so-called unity ticket was,
03:32:43.280you know, in terms of able to target different groups on the one side, but also then post-election,
03:32:52.400how well is that unity ticket going to work?
03:32:55.440Is Trump going to actually let these guys kind of run their own fiefdoms
03:36:46.700Sorry, normally I'm yelling at the sky.
03:36:49.820Yeah, she obviously sees the writing on the wall, Derek.
03:36:53.080CBS is reporting that she will not speak at her party election gala tonight at Brown University in Washington, D.C.
03:37:04.600Meanwhile, Trump is apparently on his way to a convention center near Mar-a-Lago, where he will address the faithful tonight.
03:37:13.800And I'll just give you a quick rundown on those three key states that we're focusing on, starting with Michigan. Donald Trump now 3,500, 120,000 votes ahead. He's got 50.9%. Harris 47.1%.
03:37:34.800In Pennsylvania, we have a total of 86% reporting, Trump at almost 6% or 51%, Harris at 48%, and it's a 62,000 vote lead for Trump there.
03:37:58.480And Michigan, last but not least, we have 62%, 51% for Trump, and 47% for Harris.
03:38:11.880And it's about 230,000 vote lead for Trump.
03:38:46.840I want to bring, I don't know, Josh Andrus.
03:38:49.620We're going to let Josh Andrus go soon, but maybe we want to just bring him in for his last comments from the Western Standard Stampede food critic.
03:38:57.140uh uh josh before we let you go uh you know do you want to give us uh your uh your final your
03:39:04.880final thoughts yeah um i'm once again four years later going to bed confident um i think that
03:39:14.400the republicans are going to win the white house and it looks well we already know they're going
03:39:20.880to hold the senate and the house so picking the senate yeah so yeah exactly so i mean
03:39:27.920even if they lose the white house there's a certain check that they have built into their
03:39:35.120system that helps to prevent against what we have going on up here with which is effectively tyranny
03:39:41.760of the majority so yeah no i i'm i'm going to bed confident i'm looking forward to hopefully waking
03:39:49.060up this morning and not having to deal with what we had to deal with four years ago but uh we'll
03:39:54.700see so that's all i got all right thank you that's uh josh andrus yep he is you for having me in
03:40:01.620addition to being our stampede food critic he is also a uh western standard columnist and uh the
03:40:07.600head of project uh confederate well i'm on strike for my columns again just so you know you're you're
03:40:14.040fired. I'm union busting right now. You're done. All right. Okay. See you guys. Have
03:41:06.360It seemed like people were giving us the idea at the start that,
03:41:11.700yes, we're all for Harris all the time.
03:41:13.820They weren't. And things changed over the course of the campaign, I would argue. What say you?
03:41:24.860Well, so, you see, I think we have to distinguish between those people who are seen, at least in the minds of the media and some people in the Democratic Party as spokespeople for different parts of the population.
03:41:40.520And those groups of the population themselves, you know, whether we're talking about Catholics or we're talking about women, we're talking about married couples, you know, there were lots of people who claimed to speak on behalf of these groups and claimed to say that they were going to vote for Harris.
03:41:59.660But in the event, it turned out that they were not speaking for these people, that in fact, you know, just the margin for Paris, for example, amongst women turns out be roughly 11 percent in her favor.
03:42:18.940But nobody was talking about the fact that married people broke 11 percent in favor of Trump and completely canceled out the advantage that Harris had amongst women.
03:42:36.020And, for example, the advantage you had amongst single cat ladies.1.00
03:42:40.460Well, yes, I noticed that J.D. Vance has regretted that, and rightly so. But, you know, Catholics, another group that were traditionally thought to be closer to the Democrats, much more distinct from, say, evangelicals.0.88
03:43:05.460but Trump appears to be winning the Catholic vote by 12 to 15%. You know, that decision not to go to
03:43:13.240the Al Smith dinner may have been a real faux pas by Kamala Harris. And so, you know, if you
03:43:22.860like to think of the electorate as composed of all these disparate groups and politicians are
03:43:29.380trying to win the groups uh i i actually don't think it quite works that way but if you like to
03:43:35.860think about it that way uh many of the groups that people had assumed uh were safely in the
03:43:43.780democratic camp turned out not to be that way at all and i think that a lot of it has to do
03:43:49.140with something david said that uh you know this is the first election where independents uh are
03:43:54.180a larger share of the vote uh the voting population than either of the political parties uh and um
03:44:03.220you know clearly i i think one of the things that pollsters missed is the fact that uh you know in
03:44:10.980this election donald trump was completely a known quantity he'd already been president for four
03:44:16.420years he'd been doing his thing for the last four years in opposition to the biden presidency
03:44:22.180and you know the the the media and the the democrats kept trying to re-litigate you know
03:44:28.180talking about all these things that people don't like about donald trump as if it was something
03:44:32.820they just discovered whereas the electorate knew all about that they'd made their decision they
03:44:38.340decided that even though they didn't like trump as a person that was not going to be what would
03:44:43.380decide their vote uh and uh as a result i think the the democrats ran uh uh you know a ham-fisted
03:44:52.740campaign that didn't understand what was going on in the minds of voters that thought that trump's
03:44:58.100personality was going to be the winning issue for them when in fact uh trump's personality clearly
03:45:03.940was completely discounted you know people said okay yeah okay i don't like the guy but that's
03:45:09.540not how I'm going to vote. I'm going to vote on issues. I know something about Trump. He's a
03:45:16.260known quantity to me. Kamala Harris, who's Kamala Harris? She had responsibility for the border.1.00
03:45:22.580What did she do? Nothing that anybody can discover. Actually, Trump's negatives turned out
03:45:31.780not to be as powerful as the Democrats hoped they were.
03:45:35.060So, same question to you, Brian. Where did they lose the narrative? And incidentally,
03:45:40.980what's your opinion of having celebrities join you on, you know, Beyonce come on stage,0.90
03:45:46.660go and do a chat with Oprah Winfrey? You know, is this helpful if you want to be president?
03:45:59.140Well, you can certainly take a whack at it, but I certainly want David to...
03:46:02.020well yeah i've yacked a lot why don't we let david uh all right david sure i'll pick up the celebrity
03:46:08.980question well first of all i think in my mind there were three very pivotal moments in the
03:46:14.900campaign and i i really want to pick up on a theme that i think brian's mentioned that's really
03:46:19.540important which is um because kamala harris was coronated instead of going through a normal
03:46:26.340nomination process i think her campaign began with a very tone deaf uh sort of sequencing
03:46:34.500because typically what happens when you have to win your party over you you try and appeal to your
03:46:40.980base and you you kind of get that out of your system as a party and then when you go into the
03:46:47.220general election you shift and you shift your strategy towards trying to appeal to the to the
03:46:53.940majority to the middle uh people that aren't in your base and i think kamala harris's campaign
03:46:59.460reflected a group of people that were still making arguments for their base they weren't making very
03:47:05.700good arguments for the general public which is why they went through this insane sort of lost
03:47:11.060week of trying to convince people that trump was hitler and a fascist because they had sort of this
03:47:16.420specious quote by somebody that said he said something one time about hitler's generals i
03:47:20.740mean it was it was embarrassing and i think that level of tone deafness is what happens when you're
03:47:25.380still talking to your own team and thinking you can convince somebody to sort of become a um you
03:47:32.260know a desperate hard left liberal instead of coming to them on their terms uh so i think the
03:47:38.100first mistake in a way started with with the coronation that sort of shaped a poor strategy
03:47:43.380because that then worked out who she was and what she would stand for and then how they would account0.93
03:47:47.860for that the second mistake related to that was her choice of tim waltz which was just baffling
03:47:54.340you know when you looked at the option of potentially choosing joe shapiro who's a moderate
03:48:00.340like school of choice you know can has won statewide in pennsylvania knows pennsylvania
03:48:06.100like the back of his hand and could have delivered pennsylvania focused on delivering pennsylvania
03:48:11.380to choose somebody that is already you know is as liberal as she is and she was the most liberal
03:48:16.660senator in a state that they already sort of had in their
03:48:19.600column, and turns out to have been a guy that was sort of
03:48:22.720deeply misleading about his military career, his DUI, and
03:48:27.220then was just, you know, candidly, just sort of a
03:48:29.780strange persona, was a huge unforced error. And again, I
03:48:34.240think what happened when you sort of ask yourself, how does
03:48:36.820the campaign do that? It was because they're trying to
03:48:39.220satisfy their base rather than appeal to the middle and to
03:48:42.580make a strategic mistake, when you have someone like a
03:48:45.520jules shapiro in a state like like pennsylvania is crazy so you know i i would say the one0.93
03:48:52.440moment and brian mentioned this the weekend where trump was at the al smith dinner and was given
03:48:57.640free reign to troll the harris campaign and then some of the trolling was very funny uh and then
03:49:05.160later on decided and this came out of a podcast with some some young guys that he would troll
03:49:10.740Harris for what he said was lying about her service at McDonald's, he ended up breaking
03:49:16.580the internet with those pictures of him donning an apron and serving fries and chatting up people
03:49:21.720going through the McDonald's drive-thru. And when you do the numbers, here's the interesting thing
03:49:25.700about that and how savvy this campaign is. You know, one in eight Americans has worked out of
03:49:31.440McDonald's at some point in their life. I had no idea it was epic. I did not know that McDonald's
03:49:36.720was the single largest employer, public or private, in the entire United States.
03:49:41.400I had none of those details until I dug in.
03:49:44.400I wanted to make, you know, write a note about and I wrote a post on Twitter about it.
03:49:48.900When I actually did the math, you can look this up, I was absolutely floored.
03:49:53.000So here's a guy who's trolling his opponent by appearing in McDonald's.
03:49:57.980But by doing that, he's also making himself relatable again to these independents,
03:50:02.780one in eight of whom have a deep personal relationship to having worked there.
03:50:06.720And he's well known for loving and serving it on his plane and serving his White House.
03:50:11.060And you can't make up those images. You can't deal with that level of instinct.
03:50:15.420And I think that moment, that weekend, the combination of the L Smith dinner and the moment at McDonald's was sort of this one to retail punch where you've got a guy who knew how to appeal to the middle.
03:50:27.540He was no longer trying to appeal to the Republican base.
03:50:30.520And he appealed to the middle by adopting RFK Jr., who's a well-known Democrat, doesn't agree with policy.
03:50:37.360Or make America healthy again as Trump serves McDonald's.
03:53:30.040We're going to be carrying that speech live.
03:53:32.460I just want to note, I haven't been looking at the comments,
03:53:36.100but Nico, just put that headline up for the last time.
03:53:39.780We're going to switch it back to something a bit more professional,
03:53:41.900But I just want to note that my favorite headline of the year, Florida man is on the cusp of becoming president.
03:53:53.260Always beware. Florida man always makes the best headlines.
03:53:57.220All right. Well, we'll bring it back to something a bit more professional now.
03:54:00.740So I also want to note, Nico, let's pull up the side screen here.
03:54:07.980Let's pull up not the map of my needle screen here.
03:54:11.900Yeah. Okay. So we have the New York Times live presidential forecast is up to a 93% chance that Donald Trump will win.
03:54:24.760And that's becoming statistically highly unlikely that Kamala Harris will be president.0.73
03:54:34.320Although I have a crazy, I wouldn't call it theory, but I would say guess that just for the sake of making the history books, small chance Joe Biden actually resigns before Donald Trump gets sworn in so that she gets to be president for a month or two.
03:55:44.720But I'd say she's got 25, maybe not even 25.
03:55:50.120I don't know, she's got an outside chance that the Democrats are going to do something, because you've got to remember, wokeism, social progressivism is about symbolism.
03:55:59.820And this would be symbolic. It gets her on the board as the first president.0.93
03:56:05.060Hitler Clinton didn't have that option because she wasn't the vice president running.1.00
03:56:09.300So let's look at the Electoral College estimates.
03:58:58.520It took an instruction from the Biden administration to send the Army and the Navy into a period of self-reflection in which some people were actually eased out because they wouldn't fit the new DEI look that they were seeking for the military.
03:59:54.280If I might, I think it's very important to remember that, you know, elections are by their nature kind of binary, either winning or lose, especially in a two party presidential system like this.
04:00:08.660But the other thing that we're seeing, which isn't reflected in the fact that, you know, Trump will win a major victory, is how deeply divided America is.
04:00:20.620I mean, if he wins the popular vote, it will be by, you know, maybe 1%, and he might not even win the popular vote.
04:00:29.860And, you know, the Republicans will have maybe a two-seat majority in the Senate, maybe a handful of seats majority in the House of Representatives.
04:00:41.900It doesn't take much to flip this at a future point.
04:00:45.520And remember, too, that Trump has got a maximum of four years ahead of him.
04:00:52.260He can't be reelected. His political career will be over.
04:00:56.920Halfway through a second term, most presidents lose a great deal of their political authority.
04:01:03.620There's going to be midterm elections.
04:01:05.380I mean, you know, none of the forces that have been at work in this election are are defeated.
04:01:13.240as you know somebody once said and i think it's absolutely true in politics no defeat is final
04:01:19.900and no victory is permanent that was john williamson of the canadian taxpayers well there
04:01:24.280you go and i i don't know if he was the first to say it but he was one of the early ones to repeat
04:01:30.020it uh and so you know i i wouldn't i wouldn't read uh the kind of anality into it that uh
04:02:01.060That's the message I take away from this election.
04:02:03.560Yeah. Well, I'll just note, we're waiting for kind of president-elect-ish Trump to address his supporters. He's already left his, he's already left Mar-a-Lago. He's on his way to Palm Beach Convention Center.
04:10:17.780What is the significance, if any, of a non-consecutive presidency?
04:10:25.120Other than that, instead of having to suffer eight years of Trump talking to them, Democrats now have to suffer 12 years of Trump talking to them.
04:10:34.600well lessons learned i think would be my first response to that i think the democrats can have
04:10:44.200a very hard time derailing this presidency the way they did with the russian hoax0.99
04:10:53.000yeah and and i i also think that uh trump uh learned some things about
04:11:02.520self-control in the in the first uh trump president i think he realized that he got himself
04:11:08.200unnecessarily into trouble uh in ways that are entirely avoidable and i i certainly sensed a
04:11:15.320softening uh over the course of this uh campaign and i i think we're actually going to see a
04:11:23.160different kind of trump i i think he's been a little even though he's got tremendous energy
04:11:28.360for a man's age he is he is older and i i i i think he just doesn't have quite the energy to be
04:11:36.440the disruptive for the uh that he was in his uh in his first term and i think that the uh i think
04:11:44.360the atmosphere in washington is going to be uh is going to be quite different i i i certainly think
04:11:50.520he's he's going to be more strategic in his attempt to take on you know what the british
04:11:55.960called the blob you know the uh the deep state or however you like to think about uh because i i i
04:12:02.680think it was very disorganized and kind of firing off in all directions in the first presidency i
04:12:08.920think he's going to be uh a lot more strategic uh you know his appointments uh and in uh picking
04:12:18.280those things that he thinks are really important and driving those home in a way that I think he
04:12:26.280was unsuccessful in doing in his first term. Do you think it changed when he was almost
04:12:32.040assassinated? I really think that deepened all those other trends that I talked about. I think
04:12:41.080he i think it made him realize just how vulnerable he is i mean a near-death experience does that to
04:12:49.000people uh and um you know i back to this uh this question of uh trump's inheritance you see i i
04:12:59.320think that trump has created a uh a wholly new republican party which i think david described
04:13:06.520quite well this this i this party of people who are disaffected from the elites that have been
04:13:14.440running uh washington and indeed most american institutions for uh decades and there's going
04:13:22.200to be a competition uh amongst the rising generation of republicans to gain control of that
04:13:30.520very powerful electoral coalition uh so i i don't think there will be any shortage of candidates
04:13:37.000and one of the one of the brilliant things about the american political system is all the openings
04:13:42.680that it provides to the you know the governorships and the the primary system and so on there will be
04:13:50.600a lot of contenders for the control of that uh of that coalition and it's uh fortunately i think
04:14:01.080there's a lot of talent in the republican party and it's i think it's quite unpredictable which
04:14:06.360one of them will jd vance because of his uh you know how will he perform as as vice president uh
04:14:13.720will ron de santos be able to overcome some of the weaknesses that were revealed by his attempt
04:14:19.320to displace Trump through the primary process. I think one of the things I admire most about
04:14:27.480the American system is its ability to be open to so many people who can challenge the system,
04:14:35.160who can make a bid for control of different parts of the system. And the Republican Party
04:14:42.360is blessed I think with a rising generation of leaders, several of whom I could see being the
04:14:50.020one to inherit what Trump has created. All right. So we're going to go to an update from our newsroom
04:14:57.920in just a moment. We have some new calls to make or announce. But I just want to let everyone know
04:15:05.220when uh donald trump takes the stage uh we're gonna we're gonna we're gonna show his speech
04:15:13.500when that happens but that'll that'll be the end of the show that'll be the end uh we'll have
04:15:20.560thoughts more thoughts tomorrow about that speech about you know as we learn more of the returns
04:15:26.420coming in but uh we'll leave you the last word tonight we'll go to donald trump so i i would
04:15:33.320just want to pre-thank uh Nigel and Corey joining me tonight Nico running broadcast David the news
04:15:40.980room uh Michelle and James running operations here uh and all of our guest uh guest panelists
04:15:47.900we've had Briley Crowley David Knightleg uh attempted to have David Wilkins uh from a U.S.0.92
04:15:54.820ambassador to Canada but the tech didn't work out uh Simon Hank Hankinson uh Ted Morton
04:16:00.580uh so because we'll i i'm imagining trump is going to come to the stage we're going to have
04:16:08.160a fairly rude exit so i just want to thank everyone up front now and know that i'm not
04:16:12.740intending to be a jerk i'm just going to be one uh but i'm cutting myself off at that point too
04:16:17.880uh so uh we're going to resume the discussion but first i want to go to we're going to bring
04:16:22.740dave nailer from the newsroom uh let's uh let's put dave and the map up on the screen dave what
04:16:29.380got for us? Dave, can you hear us? Nope. David Naylor in the newsroom. All right.
04:16:46.960While we're trying to get his attention, I can't.
04:16:52.540Hey, Derek. Only thing to tell you at the moment is,
04:16:55.760yes i can hear you i can't hear you can you guys hear me yes we can hear you yeah yeah yeah
04:17:03.040yes can you get i can hear you you can't hear me we can hear you yes you are good talk
04:17:14.080if uh if uh james or anyone in operations room is listening
04:17:19.200go over and slap dave in the back of the head and tell them we can hear him0.67
04:17:31.040The most interesting dynamic in terms of a close call will be Michigan because Michigan is where the Democrats first sued to keep RFK Jr. off the ballot.
04:17:43.200Then when he ended up on the ballot, sued to keep him on the ballot instead of allowing him to leave.
04:17:49.680So if we win, sorry, if the Republicans win Michigan with-
04:30:39.020Kamala Harris is not doing it as well.
04:30:42.660I mean, I don't think she actually has to concede defeat tonight
04:30:47.580because, you know, there's mail-in ballots to come.
04:30:52.140I mean, there's a small sliver of a chance, highly, highly improbable,
04:30:57.900but there's a small sliver of a chance, maybe.
04:31:01.040So, but to not come out and thank the people who voted for you, to make a generic, you know, she's the queen of generic talking point statements, come out and say, well, you know, we're going to wait until it's done, but, you know, I will respect the result regardless.
04:31:19.280Not that Trump did that, but that was her big thing.
04:31:26.980What is the significance of Kamala Harris being the second Democrat in a row to lose to Trump and not even have the guts to face the cameras the night that it doesn't go their way?
04:31:42.920well it's singularly graceless isn't it that's uh you you you do that for the sake of the people
04:31:49.640who put the money the effort and all the commitment into your campaign um in a way it kind of tells
04:31:58.520you why it was a good thing that you didn't choose these people because deep down that's the kind of
04:32:04.440people they are well yeah i mean it's unfortunately class and dignity have been lost a lot in
04:32:10.200politics in this last eight years and i blame trump a bit for that but all the same it doesn't
04:32:15.320mean they can't be better and you don't have to concede but you can't when you've got a room a
04:32:20.020full of gathered of supporters even if they're disappointed they busted their ass for you they0.64
04:32:24.380are standing there waiting for you they want to see you even if you've lost and you don't have
04:32:29.060the grace to at least come in and say thank you to them and good night um it's a sad end maybe
04:32:35.160i'll send beyonce in yeah do you think she'll sing yeah you know i i've won elections i've lost
04:32:42.920elections and you know one's a lot easier to speak to the room than the other put your man up and you
04:32:50.680do it you bite the bullet because guess what the people who busted their ass knocked on doors for0.87
04:32:56.040you hammered in signs into the frozen ground for you they worked they deserve at least a thank you
04:33:01.800They deserve a, we fought the good fight, even if we didn't win, it was worth doing.
04:33:10.720You know, your own people, your own people deserve that.
04:33:13.860And I don't think she has to concede tonight.
04:33:15.760I mean, Trump is actually now up to 181 electoral college votes expected.
04:33:25.060He's 270 called, but he's up to 281 leaning and called.
04:33:30.160Uh, I don't think it's going to be close enough for anything else to pull it away. Maybe I'll eat my words, but she doesn't have to concede tonight. There's, there's still enough.
04:33:41.160Look, I think this is the legacy of basically, you know, Hillary Clinton and the Democrats never accepted the legitimacy of Trump's victory.
04:33:54.880Trump never accepted the legitimacy of his defeat.
04:33:59.420We're now going to see the Democrats again put to the test whether or not they are going to accept the legitimacy of the process that they have participated in.
04:34:09.080You see, I think that I'm sorry to say that I think part of the reason she is not appearing is it's fine to say, well, she doesn't have to concede tonight.
04:34:19.180If she appears now, thanking her supporters and so on, I think most people will read that as a concession.
04:34:30.540And I think she's not prepared to do that yet.
04:34:33.520and i i'm i'm i'm worried that part of what's happening is we are preparing yet more uh internal
04:34:42.200strife over the legitimacy of uh america's democratic process and that worries me a lot
04:34:48.640more than whether or not there are some disappointed supporters in the room
04:34:52.000can you be a bit more explicit brian or do you not want to go there
04:34:59.580What are we talking about? Challenging ballots, challenging elections, different counting polls?
04:35:09.980Well, I mean, I'm not sure that it's going to be quite that dramatic.
04:35:21.960It may simply be, you know, that they're going to pass doubt on the legitimacy of the victory because there were, you know, that Trump employed improper means or, you know, intimidated people or whatever it is.
04:37:23.160they just can't do it, why can the left not meme
04:37:25.540Look, there's, there's so many interesting things about psychology. When I was working on the, you know, our campaign with Jason, we won a landslide. One of the things that struck me was the left is very good at, if you sort of say there's a hearts and minds strategy, left's pretty good at appealing to the heart with people, you know, and this is why wokeness has kind of had the effect that it's had.
04:37:49.600there's a there's a way of sort of they make the argument to victimhood they make the argument to
04:37:56.160empathy they make the argument to you know you know what i mean so every it's it's funny that
04:38:01.760the the right has kind of got this very well-defined sense of almost like a scorched over
04:38:09.420version of irony because we've been in the trenches for so long you know when when you have
04:38:15.440to and this was actually true what's really interesting i think that you know when you when
04:38:20.240you look at dissident art and you look at what the you know i was living next to china for 15 years
04:38:26.240and ran some ran a company that had offices in china and the chinese were exceptionally good
04:38:31.840at creating quirky funny memes and ways of beating the state in a hundred small ways that were
04:38:38.240exceptionally smart and savvy and funny um and i just think it kind of goes with the territory if
04:38:43.840you think you're outside of the cultural mainstream in some way you become pretty good at poking fun
04:38:49.280and making sure that you sort of have that edge and i think that's there's a little bit of uh
04:38:54.560punk to being conservative now because it's contrarian my son's 15 and what's funny to me
04:39:00.480right now is he and his buddies think it's very funny to punk everything that's slightly woke
04:39:06.480because the school is sort of the official kind of uh you know dogma uh of and it's to the left
04:39:14.560and so you've got if you give that crowd you know uh a chance to create a meme they're gonna come
04:39:20.720up with something pretty funny because they can so i think there's a little bit of a you know
04:39:24.960where we sit in the culture right now the uh the punk rock side is definitely on the conservative
04:39:30.080side of the table so that's why i think we're good at memes i think the left is bad at memes
04:39:35.360also because they take themselves extremely seriously because they care so much about the
04:39:40.880fact that they want the state to solve these problems and and we don't we don't think that
04:39:46.400we think that there are other social institutions humans create that are more important than
04:39:49.920government um started with the family but you know other things too the church communications
04:39:57.440the media uh the free market the economy like you know we think government's okay but we don't
04:40:03.280think that it's a disaster if government doesn't do its job i think for people on the left the
04:40:08.880government is the point and so it's hard for them to have fun talking about losing it or uh you know
04:40:14.640the stakes i think just strike them as far too high that's my cultural analysis for you since
04:40:20.800you hit me with that weird question yeah plus david don't you think that they're just censorious
04:40:25.680and puritanical yeah glorious and puritanical people have no sense of humor yeah sense of humor
04:40:32.800to be good at meaning yeah look i i think the cons i think conservatives you know it's our
04:40:39.200feature is also our bug you know like we love the debate we love the fight everybody thinks they're
04:40:45.280right everybody you know we could if we could we'd replace a premier every three months in
04:40:50.320alberta right but you know in alberta we nearly do yeah i know i know thank god she won 90.1.5
04:40:57.120percent but you know out there there's 8.5 plotting the future right now so you know we've
04:41:02.720got this competitive streak and i think that does create a little bit of you know market forces to
04:41:09.520have to come out with a way of uh explaining ourselves and figuring things out but we're up
04:41:14.240against a culture that's to your point brian um woke culture does not tolerate dissent it does
04:41:21.280not like debate it it believes that there's a dogma and it's it's worse than any other dogma
04:41:26.640because it's deeply uh you know it's a secular substitute for spiritual dog it's horrible
04:41:32.640but it yeah you can't have fun this is actually an interesting point that the harris campaign
04:41:38.080started out with this theme of joy and then the last three weeks it was hard to see a smile on
04:41:44.480anybody's face unless it was sort of this fake kind of uh laughter you know i i saw the obamas and i
04:41:51.280I think Barack Obama is an incredible communicator, so is Michelle Obama.
04:41:55.840But they were literally scolding people in large groups. There was nothing nice about it. They
04:42:03.360could see the power slipping through their fingers. And I'll tell you, one of the biggest
04:42:09.920losers from this is the Barack Obama cohort that's been running the Biden administration and was
04:42:16.640kind of running harris as their heir apparent uh they are the big losers this time around um and
04:42:24.000uh good riddance so i uh speak in a meeting here uh nico pull up let's pull up my screen here
04:42:30.160so uh mark uh cuban uh one of the major surrogates for the harris campaign uh
04:42:40.240seemingly conceding on behalf of the campaign uh saying congrats uh real at real donald trump you
04:43:07.500So there's a few things I've packaged from here.
04:43:12.800Again, general question to anyone who wants to pick it up.
04:43:16.240Um, I've had a theory in the Canadian context that I think is increasingly applicable to the American context now that women are being Canada's had one female prime minister didn't go well, but she was doomed to failure.0.98
04:43:37.340anyway. She was coming at the end of the Mulroney government. That ship was going down no matter
04:43:42.540what. And they said, let's put a lady in charge. And she sunk the ship. But the ship, the ship1.00
04:43:51.300was already half full of water. She maybe took it down further than anyone else thought possible0.94
04:43:56.020from a majority government to two seats. But, you know, I've been thinking about
04:44:02.220the damage that this is doing potentially to female political leaders1.00
04:44:09.080in the context of, you know, thought about Chrystia Freeland taking over.1.00
04:44:14.140And I thought, what better way to make sure we never have an actual female prime minister1.00
04:44:19.960who can govern for more than a few months than to put Chrystia Freeland in charge1.00
04:44:24.300and let her go down with the ship for the liberals this time?0.99
04:44:27.620um so i i don't i don't think these are exactly fair comparisons they're not apples and apples
04:44:35.900to the american context because hillary clinton was not president you know because it's a different
04:44:42.600system but uh hillary clinton went down now kamala harris has gone down they've both lost
04:44:50.180to what the democrats claim is the most sexist misogynist racist terrible guy ever who should
04:44:55.500never get elected what they claim is the most defeatable republican of all time and now two
04:45:01.980women have both lost to him um i guess so the kind of the question i'll put broadly is between
04:45:12.100clinton and harris have they done damage to the idea that america's gonna get a woman president
04:45:20.440at some point oh and it will at some point just not this year um you know there's so much talk
04:45:27.880among women who operate in that area at that level about about women it's what they're fixated on1.00
04:45:39.800if you had listened to if you kamala harris and nobody else you would have got the idea that this
04:45:46.120was the election about abortion, the ultimate women's issue.0.99
04:45:51.760So they would say to you, well, you know, I think it was CNN had a screen up earlier.
04:46:02.500They'd done a poll on what were the major issues of the election to women,1.00
04:49:26.360There's a leader of the country who happens to be a woman.1.00
04:49:28.540they're not a woman who happens to be the leader of a country and that's the difference like good0.99
04:49:33.480luck getting men to buy into that especially in the in the era of woke identity politics
04:49:39.380where you know it's uh you're a piece of crap because you're a white male and if you don't
04:49:45.400vote for this person you're a bad person that's that's not a compelling reason to vote for someone
04:49:50.320one of the one of the principal fault lines in this whole election for the democratic national
04:49:56.280committee and kamala harris is nikki haley is a very accomplished person more accomplished than
04:50:01.320kamala harrison in many respects you know governor south carolina she went through a very tough
04:50:06.600nomination process she lost to a tough guy donald trump um she came out and endorsed him she went on
04:50:13.080the stump for him she uh holds her own you know kamala harris was sort of from the very beginning0.97
04:50:19.880sort of started life as a sugar baby to willie brown you know she was given uh positions by him
04:50:27.080she became part of the uniparty state in california and after winning the senate seat was appointed0.89
04:50:34.280as biden said because he would only appoint a woman who was black and i think that the fact
04:50:40.600that she was coronated instead of nominated is a huge problem so i i think to be fair to women if
04:50:46.760if there is a you know future nikki haley or a georgia maloney or margaret thatcher you know
04:50:54.680my guess is the next person the the woman that does become the president united states will1.00
04:51:00.920definitely come from the republican side because of that because i don't think that somebody like
04:51:06.120kamala harris i mean she was a lightweight and it came out when they tried to run the campaign by1.00
04:51:11.640keeping her scripted rather than allowing uh rather and she wouldn't allow herself to get out
04:51:16.740and it's David I think that's a column you should write uh because I I think in all probability the
04:51:22.320first woman president unless Biden just bows out to let her get her portrait on the wall and she1.00
04:51:28.660gets to be a Kim Campbell kind of thing yeah but see then it won't matter that that would be a Kim
04:51:32.160Campbell yeah it'd be purely tokenistic and and that's what woke progressivism is largely about
04:51:38.180is tokenism symbolism that kind of thing but that happens or not the first female president of1.00
04:51:45.620substance i think is likely to be a republican i don't know who that's going to be vicky haley
04:51:51.380uh it could i don't know who but i i think that's a column i think that's something you should maybe
04:51:56.900uh explore in a column in the next uh day or two okay if we could just make assignments right here
04:52:04.100on the air that's right i just had a text from a reader who says do you think that there is a
04:52:11.300significant risk that there will be another assassination attempt um i'll be shocked if
04:52:18.020there isn't yes the democrats have raised the temperature to the law like if you believe
04:52:25.780he is the end of the republic do you not have an obligation to kill him you do yeah like
04:52:31.940Like a God-fearing, red-blooded American has the obligation to pick up a gun and whack him if they think he is what the Democrats say he is.
04:54:37.780I'd like to ask either David or Brian,
04:54:44.000what do you think that's going to be like?
04:54:47.300do we still have you gentlemen yeah look i'll comment on that i think um
04:54:55.500i think it's extraordinary i i you know i i have to say this one of the things that i admire about
04:55:01.560the americans as a canadian and uh you know my parents are british is you know we conduct we
04:55:07.460try and conduct ourselves decorum up here i i guess the best way to put it they litigate
04:55:12.540absolutely everything openly all the time and they have had civil war they've had a war of everything
04:55:20.860like like you know they're up for the fight um in the the culture war is there in full swing and i
04:55:28.460do think there's there's something profound about the shaping of the nation from the very beginning
04:55:34.380being being sort of you know birthed in blood or whatever the the language is about that
04:55:39.500But I do think that they have sort of defined themselves as a nation that had to fight for, to become and to create what they've created.
04:55:50.120And I think there's something kind of symbolic about the fact that it's a Trump presidency that will be celebrating that moment, because it seems like sort of the, you know, the dynamics of this election in this moment, there seems to be a fight less less in the physical realm more in terms of what this culture will be and what it will be about and how that will be shaped and defined.
04:56:14.540So I think we sort of traded the war that founded the country, Revolutionary War.
04:57:12.400One of the great strengths to me, one of the great strengths of the American political system is the primaries.
04:57:20.300And it's perhaps the single most thing I'm envious about the American political system of that I wish we had here is primaries.
04:57:28.320That nominations are not completely controlled by the party.
04:57:33.000You know, you could have an insurgent on the right wing of the conservatives like a Ron Paul, and he sits there and he's just a pain in the ass for the conservatives all the time.
04:57:40.460and he's a voice of conscience and he might be, but you can't get rid of him.
04:57:45.340They can try and get rid of him, but you can't because there's a primary
04:57:47.480and the people in his district keep putting them there.
04:57:49.200And the Democrats can have a communist like AOC or Bernie Sanders
04:57:56.540And they're there as the left-wing anchor of that party
04:58:00.060and they might want to get rid of them, but they can't because it's up to the people.
04:58:03.440And, you know, and then they found the short circuit. They found the short circuit here. And that is to run the primary with the geriatric guy who can't think because he's the incumbent and the incumbent, other than Lyndon Johnson, has always got through.0.85
04:58:25.140and then you just pull essentially a partisan coup and it shows you the value of the hardening
04:58:36.180that because you know there how many great candidates have there been that we thought
04:58:40.160and they got into the primary process and they shriveled Rand Paul man I thought Rand Paul was
04:58:46.340the greatest thing I still think Rand Paul is great Howard Dean Howard Dean yeah like Democrats
04:58:51.740loved Howard Dean. Guys like me loved Rand Paul. And they got the primary system, they got the
04:58:57.460primary process and the light just shriveled them up. You need that hardening process. You need to
04:59:03.180put them in the forge of the primary because you get out there and it turns out you can't think
04:59:08.900or put together a coherent sentence. A guy like Donald Trump is going to eat you for lunch.
04:59:14.260yeah the primary just makes you say who you are and that's really the thing that people started
04:59:23.780to learn about kamala harris awfully close to the actual election date when it came i think that
04:59:30.660may be something of what we were talking about earlier i said kind of where did the where did
04:59:35.220the harris team lose it well they would have never had it to lose if they had gone through a proper
05:03:34.720Look, I thought going into the election that there was a really good chance that the Republicans would lose the House.
05:03:43.460Not by much, but it's always been, the last couple of elections, a fairly finely balanced thing.
05:03:50.240I think there is no, I think, obvious majority in the House for a major restructuring of spending in Washington.
05:04:06.300And since the House is the really key chamber with respect to money matters, I think Elon Musk may find his ambitions to be a little bit thwarted.
05:04:24.540The other thing I'd say about the Senate is, yes, I think that the Republicans are going to do much better there than we had expected.
05:04:33.520they might get as many as 54 senate seats but remember the filibuster rule uh and you know
05:04:42.480it takes 60 60 votes to beat a filibuster and um that means that even if the republicans have a
05:04:51.360majority if it's uh if it's south of 60 uh it doesn't it it it gives them the majority but
05:04:58.640but it doesn't give them the whip hand in the Senate.0.91
05:08:41.400I'm just telling you that that is the strategy in the Liberal Party in Ottawa,
05:08:47.940that they are going to run not against Pierre Folliver,
05:08:51.200they're going to run against Donald Trump and just say Pierre is simply Trump's representative in Canada.
05:08:56.960I'm not saying it's going to succeed, but that's going to be the strategy.
05:09:00.240Okay. I want to just pull back to the map for a moment here. So here's where we're at. Trump has won every swing state so far that's been called.
05:09:14.300He won North Carolina. He won Georgia. He won Ohio. He won Pennsylvania. He's leading well in Arizona.
05:09:25.740Oh, they just called Wisconsin for him. It's not even close now. It's not even close.
05:09:32.900Wisconsin, let's take a look at what's up in there.
05:16:20.280um i before you go i i know that you did tell me once that you thought that trump was going to win
05:16:32.200it seems you have a powerful gift of prophecy so are we all going to make money out of this well
05:16:42.680well i i didn't i didn't bet in the betting market i should have uh but i i will say that uh i i
05:16:48.760predicted he would win by between 50 and 60 electoral college votes so uh my my prediction
05:16:55.160wasn't wasn't that accurate uh but you know the only thing that matters is did he win or not uh
05:17:02.440um i i think the next conversation we have to have is so what's the significance of this trump
05:17:11.000victory uh obviously we have to think about that for canada uh and you know we're not americans
05:17:19.480we didn't vote in this election uh america believe me my my institute is open to washington office i
05:17:27.640i get my nose rubbed all the time in the fact that americans just don't give a damn about canada0.78
05:17:33.480uh they're not even entirely sure where it is uh and um uh that's that's that's the
05:17:41.800important conversation that uh we have to have now that we have the facts and we're not just
05:17:46.920speculating uh there there are going to be massive issues for canada and for nato and for ukraine
05:17:56.280and for china uh as a result of what we now know about the the uh the the profile of power in
05:18:04.520washington for the next i think uh you know what uh we've been waiting for trump to come on but
05:18:14.040he's not and i mean we're uh we're now 20 minutes after midnight mountain standard time so uh and
05:18:23.080Man, you two have been well over the clock, and our two last guests, you know, it's not like, you know, we're at a party, and you're like the guys who won't go home, and I'm like, hey, you want me to call you a cab?
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