The Musical Innertube - Volume 2, Number 162 - Dick Polman on Election 2024

JOHN

On today's Musical Innertube, we welcome back, political commentator Dick Polman. Dick is Maury Povich Writer In residence and professor of journalism at the University of Pennsylvania, where he's been since 2006. He's also a former national political writer and political columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Follow his work at dickpolman.net. Welcome back, Richard.

DICK

Nice to see you guys again.

JOHN

Tell us for a minute or two what's on your mind in this election week. What are you thinking about a lot?

DICK

Well, besides, besides trying to think about what palliatives I may need on election night...

JOHN

Yeah.

DICK

To get through it and...

DON

I recommend Scotch! That works for me.

DICK

Yeah, we're making homemade pizza.

DON

That's good.

DICK

So, some kind of comfort food. But aside from that, what I'm looking at is - I'm trying to think ahead to, to election night. And what might give us some kind of reasonable early interpretation of how this election is going. And I've noticed that actually, two of the seven swing states, Georgia and North Carolina, are expected to report results early, in part because they actually have a lot of early voting that takes place now, and, you know, they can tabulate that all along, you know, even before election night. So, I have a feeling that Georgia and North Carolina are going to come in early, and I'm going to be looking at those to see if there's any trend lines that might tell us something big. For instance, North Carolina, which hasn't gone Democratic since 2008, Obama's first win, is actually very much in play by all implications. And if for some reason Harris looks like she's running very strongly there, stronger than anticipated, it might, you know, it might mean that she's going to do well in the election. And the same thing for Georgia, of course. And the, the indicators that we see, so far, as they've been actually tabulating along gender lines, who has been voting early  in those two states, and a few others too, and it turns out that something like 55% of the turn out and in the early voting has been female and 45% male. So, if you take into account what every single poll is indicating is that there's a major gender gap in that women are strongly pro-Harris, particularly women of color. That might be something that the Harris campaign can feel good about. The other thing I wanna look at on election night, and then I'll answer your question in a broader sense, is sometime around 5-6 o'clock, I think we're probably going to see some kind of exit poll results which are, you know at least some kind of a snapshot, interviewing people coming out of the of the voting booth. And those aren't necessarily completely reliable, I think. I mean, I remember 20 years ago, when John Kerry was running against George W Bush, who was the incumbent. The exit polls seem to indicate that Kerry was going to win the election, and then it kind of just turned out that that Democratic voters were just much happier to talk to exit pollsters than Republicans were. So, you know, they have to take them with a grain of salt. In terms of at least the horse race aspect, but in terms of some of the demographic breakdown that you'll see there in terms of, I don't know, black women, white women, men, black men, education levels, college educated voters tend to be much more for Harris in all the polls and non-college are much more for Trump. So, we might get some kind of numbers that give us some kind of sense of how this thing is going to shake out. Having said all that, what I'm thinking about more than anything else is that - and I dearly, dearly hope I'm wrong about this - is that we're only at the beginning of the beginning. And you know, on election night, we just may not know enough about how this thing is gonna go. And Pennsylvania, of course, which is, you know, both the candidates have been camping out in Pennsylvania, is probably not going to get sorted out until they say late in the week or Saturday, which is what happened in 2020, because, by law, the mail in ballots can't get counted, they can't start getting counted until after the polls close. So that's probably gonna, you know, really string out over time. So, and that last part of it is what I'm really, you know, kind of dreading the most. And this is even if it looks like Harris seems to be heading toward a decisive win, which I suppose is possible. All the scenarios are that you know we're going to get a ton of, you know, 2020 redo here with Trump saying that, you know, the votes are rigged. And he's already doing it there since he's been putting stuff on social media for the last couple of days, basically saying that, oh, Pennsylvania's cheating already. What's that phrase he likes? "At a level like we've never seen before.” Presumably the Democrats are going to be ready for it this time. They've had their own army of lawyers, you know, but this, who knows? Maybe this is gonna go on for weeks. I think regardless, regardless of who wins this thing, I don't know if our bodies are built for another three month overtime.

JOHN

Well, I have to say, Richard, you know, the last time when we went to bed without a call, I don't think I have ever spent such a terrible night. I couldn't sleep. But you know, I've been watching so much political stuff on the on television and listening to so much on the news and I couldn't, I couldn't sleep. So, I went downstairs, and I kept watching it. They kept saying, well, we won't know until tomorrow. So, I wasn't learning anything, but I just, it was so hard to sleep. I imagine a lot of people are going to have the same issue.

DICK

Yeah, you're talking about 2020.

JOHN

Yes, I am.

DICK

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I have to say what I remember was in 2016, when you know, we kind of knew that Trump was gonna win by 11:00 PM on election night. In 2020, where we didn't know, I had to force myself to go to bed at a reasonable hour because I had to get up in the morning and write something. And I had a political journalism class at Penn that met in the afternoon, and everybody was going to be writing stuff, and I had to read it all before. So, I had to force myself to go to bed. But you know, beyond that, I could never, nobody could have foreseen what we had to deal with for the next two months. And what's really kind of, you know, obviously disturbing about it, self-evident really, is that it's part of Trump's brand, which is basically tear down our institutions and our democratic process and the voting process and the credibility of the process and the integrity of the process, you know, are all part of the potential damage. I feel really, really bad for, you know, these election poll workers who, you know, are just giving up their time to try to do the right thing. And you know, I don't know, I hope none of them get manhandled the way that Rudy Giuliani did with those two women in Georgia who have successfully sued him sued him now.

DON

Yeah, now they own this apartment. Yay. You know, back in 2020, when all these lawsuits flew around and we had - even after the election was called, and apparently, well, heck, right up until January 6th when we had the Electoral College being verified in the Capitol - as far as the lawsuits went, Trump was 0 for 43 or however many he filed.

DICK

0 for 60, Don, nationwide, it was 0 for 60.

JOHN

Don’s just trying to give him credit.

DON

No, I'm not. I'm not. I lost count after 43 actually. But the other thing, though, is that a lot of election officials say that they're ready. They've learned from 2020, and they've called for extra security at polling places and things like that, extra security for poll counters and that sort of thing.

JOHN

Right, exactly. Exactly.

DICK

Yeah. Yeah.

DON

But we've also heard rumors that there are people in office in Republican-controlled states that have passed laws that make it more difficult - like in Georgia, I mean, I guess this was thrown out, but they wanted you to hand count every ballot afterwards.

DICK

The judge ruled that out.

DON

This is all going to prolong it by how long, do you think you know? Days, weeks, months?

DICK

Well, you know. I mean that actually depends, I'd say that depends on how close or not close the races are. I think one of the things the Harris campaign has been trying to emphasize, or people certainly who support her, is that we need as decisive a victory as possible, in order to, you know, it might take the steam out of some of these efforts. So if she wins, I don't know, in a landslide - nobody wins a landslide the way we used to have landslides, you know. A landslide used to be defined as 60%, right? So yeah, you know, Reagan in 84, Johnson in 64. Now I guess the landslide would be, you know, 53 percent or something like that which hasn't happened really since George HW Bush in 1988. That was the biggest one in the last what, 26? Whatever that is, 28 years, 26 years? Am I counting right? 36 years. Excuse me. So, you know, we're looking for if she can somehow get maybe 53% of the vote and that's in the outer limits. I always thought, what I'm sobered by, I suppose it's the right word, is in 2020, you know. Biden won by, you know, he got 51% of the vote. I think Trump got 47, something like that. And Biden won by 7 million votes, right, in the in the popular vote. And the in the Electoral College he won by the exact Electoral College count that Trump won by four years earlier, and yet it didn't matter, you know. And yet he still pushed all these things. But, you know, and that's  a hallmark of authoritarianism, that to think that elections don't count unless you win.

JOHN

The most recent batch of polls that I've - and I realize that polls are kind of shadow boxing and with all those "granteds” put in there - the most recent polls I've seen show that Harris has established leads, not big leads, but established leads in Wisconsin and in Michigan, but is more or less tied in Pennsy. And I'm wondering if you'd like to meditate for a moment on what, what makes Pennsy different, what's going on in that state?

DICK

That's a good question. I I'm a little bit flummoxed by that. I'm not so sure, John, that I really know the answer to that. I think the poll you're referring to may have been the ABC News Ipsos poll.

JOHN

It was. I think it was.

DICK

Yeah. I don't know why Pennsylvania's closer. Maybe it's just has something to do with Elon Musk trumping around here, offering money to people, or maybe it just has to do with the, you know, that the “T” is so culturally conservative and so receptive to what Trump is saying. I don't quite understand it myself. The problem I have with the polls is that we don't know if they are missing some kind of undercurrent that's out there that we're not going to know about until the votes come in. I always think back to 2022 when everybody, and the press especially, everybody was saying a red wave that's going to hit the mid-term elections. Everybody was saying red wave, white Republicans are going to win big in the House and Senate.

DON

Right.

DICK

It didn't happen and, in in part, the reason it didn't happen was because it was the first election after Roe versus Wade was overturned. You had women coming out, you know, all teed up. And one of the things that's possible here that the polls might be missing, and maybe this would be arguably true in Pennsylvania as well, is that the polls are missing a lot of, say, first-time voters, young, especially first-time voters who are women, you know, who are saying, basically, this is enough of this. You know, we gotta get rid of this guy. And our reproductive rights have been taken away and we don't want it. You know, we don't want to have them doubling down on it with a national abortion ban, or JD Vance and the stuff that he keeps talking about. So, it's possible that polls are missing those people, I mean, including perhaps women who are married to Trump-supporting guys who are going to go into the booth and they're going to vote for Harris and there's no one else there with them, you know, kind of a silent vote. Now maybe this is pipe dream stuff. I don't know. The other thing about Pennsylvania that may not be showing up in these polls - Pennsylvania has about 5 and half million, or more, voters, potential voters, of Puerto Rican descent and the Madison Square Garden stuff has really just become, you know, viral. And you've got all these, you know, these Hispanic influencers, Puerto Rican-Americans, Hispanic influencers, who are, you know, telling their 40 million followers, etcetera, that you know they're endorsing Harris now in part because of this. And there was one, actually a major one, who just switched his endorsement, I think it was yesterday, from Trump to Harris. So that's what we don't know if the polls missed. In 2022, you know, when they were doing the red wave scenario, they missed these women and you know, maybe that's what's happening again. These are what Donald Rumsfeld would have called the “unknown unknowns.”

JOHN

The things that we don't know we don't know.

DON

Yeah, exactly. Let me preface this with a story. When I purchased my first smartphone after giving up my flip phone a number of years ago I made sure I had one with a QWERTY keyboard. And the reason I did is because my children never call me. They text me. And as a matter of fact, that now extends to a lot of friends and other family. I get far more texts than I do phone calls, and this has been brought up a number of times when they talk about the way polls are conducted. Are they still conducted by phone? And if so, are we missing out on all those people who just don't use their phones anymore?

DICK

Yeah, especially young people.

DON

Yeah, they text each other or they, you know, they use other methods of communication other than answering the phone. I know my phone is also set that any number that I don't have in my book automatically goes to voicemail. So, I know other people have that as well.

DICK

Well, I think that pollsters have been saying, I can't quote anything off top my head right now, but I know I've read stuff saying where all these polls say that they are trying, that they've tried to correct for that by having the number of people that they talk to, or what they would consider to be a satisfying enough sample of the cell phone respondents. You know that they're working that in, however they get their numbers. What I don't get a sense of what they've corrected for is when they say, “likely voters.” This is what always what we say, you know, we don't want to just see polls that say registered voters. We want to look at polls that say here's what likely voters are going to do. But what is the definition of a “likely voter,” right? You know, and I think from everything I've read, part of the definition is that people who have a voting history, you know, they voted. And if they remember - you know, sometimes people don't even remember if they voted or who they voted for, it's just not important. But if they voted the last three elections or whatever, well, now they are a “likely voter.” But what happens when you're talking about a first-time voter? Do they get, you know, do they get sampled as “likely voters?” I just asked that question without really knowing the answer to that. But I think, you know, I guess as someone who watches this stuff closely, too closely for my own sanity, I have never really seen that question answered to my satisfaction.

JOHN

Since we're talking about voting and since the three of us belong to the gender that's responsible for 87% of all the violent crime and theft in the world, evidently - in other words, we are men, and men are bad and ugly and horrible and also smell funny. Men are also a problem in this election, yeah. They are a big one. There are a lot of reasons. For example, I'll just ask you this question. Is there going to be a “Bradley effect” in this vote? There certainly was one, I think in 2016. And what I mean by that is Tom Bradley was the black mayor of Los Angeles, and he thought he was going to win big in a state election, and all the polls said he was going to win really big, and everybody snuck off to the voting booth and voted for the white guy. And it happened twice in a row, and it's become the “Bradley effect.” I'm just wondering if we get a national “Bradley effect.”

DICK

Yeah, well, I think that we have to see how this is going to be measured, or how it can be measured is very hard. But I think there's the racism and misogyny factors here, and now, you know, Harris is kind of a twofer in that category. Absolutely. And I think it's hard to pull on that because, you know, what people are gonna wanna get on the phone and say that - you know what? I guess some don't mind. I guess some would admit it. I think some of them were on stage at the Madison Square Garden event. But you know, the average person is not going to tell a pollster, “No, you know, I'm not going to. I think she's qualified, but I'm not going to vote for her because she's black.” But I think that's a factor that we have to pay attention to. And it's not just talk. I was thinking today about the misogyny factor, and there have been interviews, I mean, some of its anecdotal interviews or whatever, with African American men that that don't like the fact that she's a woman. You know, maybe they feel in some ways that that is partly, I don't know, emasculating or something. And I say that because you mentioned John, you brought up the issue of men in general, and I think what's going on with men? When you look at this, you know that solid support that Trump has among men generally, particularly white men, particularly white men, non-college educated, particularly non college educated white men who are below the middle class. I think they feel, I don't know, rightly, wrongly, fairly or not, they feel that the country's changing and in ways that in the 21st century that's leaving them behind. And you know, the whole idea perhaps of a patriarchal - you know, we were once a patriarchal society, it's much less so now, and I feel, I think there's a lot of guys - and you can see it in the interviews - a lot of guys feel threatened by all the changes. And then Kamala looks like she might embody those changes - excuse me, epitomize - and I think that's one of the reasons that Trump's been doing all these podcasts with, you know, these podcasters who have, like, you know, huge male audiences, like Joe Rogan. The reason he put in three hours with him the other day, you know, the reason he was driving around yesterday in that sanitation truck, you know, going in circles. If there's a metaphor there, you know, block that metaphor! But you know it's to show this kind of, like, guy strength, you know. Yeah. Certain kind of guy strength and you know he's good at the visuals of it, you know it's part of his mad genius.

So, you know that's, I mean, we're going to have, I think, probably when this all shakes out, potentially the biggest gender gap of any election. And we've had them now for quite a while.

DON

We always talk about undecided voters, and I think we've mentioned it in previous podcasts, Dick, where undecided voters are usually people that aren't paying attention.

DICK

Uh-huh.

DON

Until they have to, until they're forced to go into the voting booth. And people who aren't paying attention, who may be picking up now on the advertising, on the relentless advertising that is going on right now, are seeing all the Super PACs, the ones that were unleashed with the with the Supreme Court decision. “Harris has unleashed thousands of killer immigrants on us.” “The streets are not safe.” You know that whole thing, that whole level of danger. So, on top of the misogyny, you have this level of danger, which of course, Trump just jumps on top of.

DICK

And you know, and there's a very receptive audience for that. That's part of it for the audience that feels that the country is changing in ways that they can't abide or fathom.  And you know, the whole notion, when he says, you know, in the debate, for example, when he says the Haitians are eating the cats and they're eating the dogs, you know, you know, it's entirely possible and maybe even likely, that a lot of the people who were receptive to that kind of messaging don't necessarily even care whether he's telling the truth on that, in terms of fact checking it. It's more a question of, you know, that it's a representation of the threat that they feel, and so the factual aspect of it doesn't matter. And here's another thing that Don was just talking about. Some of these ads, you know, about the immigrants and how she's unleashing all these migrants who are committing crime, etcetera, etcetera - and this is this is what's kind of - you know, in a thirty-second ad, as we've known for many years, it's not exactly a haven for nuance or facts. You know you can't factually rebut it because it's just so visceral and it's emotional. And the fact of the matter is, there have been so many studies on this - and as soon as I say the word studies, it's like oh, here's what the elitists say, right? But there are studies have been showing for a long time that crime in this country, the crime rate among American-born Americans of all races, including whites, is higher than the crime rate among undocumented immigrants. Yes, there have been some, you know, horrible, tragic murders and, you know, just like he's mentioned a few times, and he did that at the Madison Square Garden thing. But you could easily put up, you know, any number of horrific crimes that people who were born here native here, been here for generations, commit. And their crime rate is higher. But you know, Harris, to her credit, all of this - it really would be ideally be great if she could do this, but she can't. She just doesn’t want to get tied up in that, she just doesn’t want to take the bait and say, “Yes, but you know,” she’d be explaining, “yes, but the studies show this. And the studies show that.”

JOHN

You can't.

DICK

Yeah, then you're on defense. And I give them, I give her campaign credit for basically saying we're gonna have our message, what we want to say thematically, and he's going to say what he says thematically, and hopefully it'll shake out that, you know, that her message will trump the fear. I I'm using the word “trump” there inadvertently as a pun.

JOHN

Very clever, Richard.

DICK
Thank you.

DON

Yeah, as a as a verb. I know that, even the mainstream press, which is, you know, is just so much in love with Trump because he'll say outrageous things. And, you know, television loves a spectacle. But by the same token, when they made their big final pushes over the weekend, when Trump was at Madison Square Garden spewing hate, and Harris was on the ellipse near the Capitol talking about uniting people and all that, that seemed to be a message that the mainstream media was in love with, they loved to do that almost a split screen with those two, and talk about how the messages were that much different. So, I don't know if that landed with anybody, but that was...

DICK

I agree with that. And given that, you can just imagine how incandescently angry the Harris campaign, and Harris herself probably, must have been when Joe Biden stepped in it, and stepped on their message by saying the thing, garbling his sentence. He was talking either about the guy who was on stage was garbage, or that his message was garbage, the comedian, I should say, but it came out sounding like he was maybe saying that all Trump supporters were garbage.  I can see why they kept him off the campaign trail because he - you know, it was insane. And you mentioned the press. And yes, I think they I think she got mostly a good split screen out of that, but having, in the last 24 hours, once Biden said that thing about garbage, then it was all of a sudden all over the news cycle. And the Times was running stories all about it, and CNN wouldn't let it go. And you know, I found that kind of frustrating because, you know, for months and months and months, Trump has been talking about anybody that doesn't vote for him as vermin and as the enemy within. And he said, we have the whole country as a garbage can. And he said that the people supporting Harris are garbage, quote, unquote, from September 7th. And so, it's like, you know, let's have some proportionality here folks. But you know and I know, I understand how our mainstream media friends operate, and you know we've all been part of it in one way or another. They want to be able to say they're holding both candidates accountable, but things are asymmetric in a way that they've never been in our lifetimes.

JOHN

Absolutely.

DICK

So I hope this, this little Biden flap, you know, will probably – maybe - has died out by this afternoon, because it's just, you know it's been getting in the way of Harris' closing message.

JOHN

 I should have thought that the media saw, in Biden's words, whatever they were, and I've listened to them five times and I'm going to be agnostic about what he was trying to say, ‘cause I have no idea. But they saw in it kind of an echo of the “deplorables” episode with Hillary Clinton, which is often referred to when trying to account for her loss. And they saw it as something like the same thing, although it isn't like the same thing, it isn't actually. It's very different, but they saw it like that, and they just went to town with as they saw a story.

DICK

Well, certainly, the Republicans wanted to, they wanted to change the conversation. They wanted to get the conversation away from what happened on that stage in Madison Square Garden. And it was like, oh my God, now we've got something to ride with. But here's one of the biggest differences of all. And, you know, write it on the blackboard 50 times:  Joe Biden is not the candidate. Joe Biden is lame duck. He's gonna be leaving the White House. He's not the candidate. Hillary Clinton was the candidate, and maybe she took heat for that that she should or shouldn't have, but Biden's not the candidate, and the fact that he said what he said and garbled it the way he said it was precisely the reason why Democrats took away the car keys in the first place.

DON

Do you think the effort in recent weeks, maybe the last three or four weeks, to tie Harris to the Biden administration and to say that her administration will just be a continuation of those policies, does that hold any water at all?

DICK

One of the tricky things she's had to deal with all along, is that she's from the incumbent party. Incumbents are typically having to defend what they do, and it's very sensitive for her, obviously, because you know she's only been able to separate in some ways so much from him and. I guess what's also been very difficult for her, is that she hasn't wanted to get sucked into a conversation about what was actually a very, very strong record of achievement in any number of things that that Biden got and was able to pass with the closely divided Congress. You know, the biggest investment in climate change ever, all kinds of stuff involving semiconductors, you know, factories getting built here. The Inflation Reduction Act, I mean there was the Infrastructure Act and the roads and bridges that have been built with the unprecedented amount of money that people have been talking about for years needed to happen. And so, it's happening everywhere and, you know, conservatives drive on those roads and bridges, too. I think it's been hard for her to walk that line. Frankly, I think that's been one of the hardest things. So, she said this thing on The View where she said Well I just I can't think of anything off the top of my head that, you know, where she differs with him. And she's come up with better answers for that lately. One of the things that she's been able to do, and sure hasn't talked about it much lately once she unveiled it a few weeks ago, is that she wants to expand Medicare so that it'll cover at-home services for seniors living at home who really need nursing care and all this kind of stuff, which, you know, private insurance is very spotty about. And that's big, you know, expanding Medicare to help people at home. Now, Joe Biden hasn't pushed that out, but she has, and that's something that she could actually, I suppose, be talking about more in the in the closing days. But yeah, so it's been a real balancing act, you know, here's the economy, which is in many ways - I just saw the Wall Street Journal today has a story referring to the remarkable economy, referring to the American economy right now, the remarkable economy, this is Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal. The Economist, just a few weeks ago said that the American economy is the strongest in the Western world. I suppose she could start saying, you know, Joe Biden has brought us back from the pandemic, et cetera, et cetera. But by the same token, she's had to say, and we've heard her say, yes, but we have a lot more work to do. You know, a lot of people are still feeling the tension certain ways, you know. Inflation has gone back down, but that's still where people's heads are at. So, the whole incumbency factor that Don just brought up, you know that's been very hard for her to navigate, and she's had to do it overnight, virtually speaking, you know, the shortest presidential campaign that anybody can remember.

JOHN

Looking at this this campaign, and to see one side that seems to be doing everything wrong. And, by the way, not to be outdone, we have Trump being quoted as saying I'm going to protect women whether they want it or not, which was really a smart thing to say. I mean, for anybody else, a horrible mistake - and there have been plenty - and then you have this delicate tightrope-walking campaign by Harris, which has been free of horrible sort of “atomic bomb” lapses. In fact, it's been a pretty good campaign, but I think the other thing that contributes to the asymmetrically that you were mentioning, Richard, is that she's running against a celebrity politician and the people who follow him grade him on how well he's doing what he does. People really like his irreverence. They like his norm busting. They like the fact that he does not respect the system, and they liked it when he was the host of the TV shows that he's hosted. That whole campaign runs by different rules. So, when he makes political errors, it doesn't seem to count.

DICK

Yeah. Yeah, no. I mean, there's a double standard, and there's a double standard applied to these candidates. Double standard in a lot of the coverage as well. Somebody said, I wish I had thought of this, but I can’t remember who said it on CNN, that, “He gets to be lawless, and she has to be flawless.”

JOHN

That’s perfect!

DICK

It might have been Van Jones, actually. But you know, I mean, it kind of goes to what you were just saying. For him, you know, he can say, oh, I'm gonna send the military after my enemies, and I'm going to have this mass deportation with no price tag involved and nobody asks what the hell the price tag is, and all that. But she is like, “Well, you had a different position on something five years ago than you seem to have now.” And teasing that out. And it just comes back to this notion that I'm sure a lot of women are pretty upset about, which a lot of women, I suspect, see in the workplace - you've got a highly qualified woman, and she has to be that, that, that, that, that much better than a totally unqualified man. Like you were saying, John, you know the fact that he's got this celebrity status really has a lot to do with it because it's like all his flaws are kind of just like baked in the cake in some ways.

JOHN

Yeah, yeah.

DICK

I was giving a talk earlier today. And we got into this whole thing about the ground game and the canvassing. And everybody's been saying, and, apparently, it's true, that Harris has a much stronger ground game going door to door, much more meticulous, much more, you know, detailed than he does and that he's like outsourced a lot of it to some kind of Elon Musk associated PAC or something. But by the same token, does he even need a ground game? Everybody knows him. He’s got a 1000% identity. You know that. Everybody knows everything about him at this point. There's nothing new that you have to persuade people about if you're going door to door and that all goes back to what? John said this. It goes back to that TV show he had, and I was saying to these people today, earlier today, that one of the things that the media missed a lot of in 2016 - I include myself in this - is that he had  a built in audience from his TV show from his, you know, his fake quiz show, whatever that was.

JOHN

The Apprentice.

DICK

That, yeah, that NBC built up for him. He had built an audience. So, to them he was already a well-known TV character. They knew all his quirks and the way he talked and oh, wow,  now he's gonna take on politics! And so, yeah, so this entertainment, this is one of the things that he's understood with his mad genius is the entertainment factor, the “bread and circuses” factor. But sometimes that's how some societies wind up with authoritarianism, is these “bread and circus” distractions.

DON

Yeah, he's like Andy Griffith from that old movie. What was it? Face in the crowd?

DICK

A Face In The Crowd. I just saw that recently. Yeah, and that was very resonant.

DON

 Where Andy Griffith was a was a grassroots politician that took everybody by storm even though he didn't mean a damn thing he said. And, you know, I'm sure books could be written about Trump's appeal and why it is, even though rational people - I've had several Republicans tell me in the last two weeks, “I hate Trump, but I'm voting for him anyway.”

DICK

And what reasons were they giving?

DON

Oh, just you know, I mean, they got into stuff about the economy. One person started telling me all sorts of bullcrap about how, when Harris was - I can't, I don't know if this allegation was when she was vice-president or District Attorney or Attorney General, but when she walked into the room, everybody had to lower their eyes and say yes, ma'am, and couldn't directly address her. You know, I mean, who knows that? Who is in the room when she does that?

DICK

That - I've never, I don't know, I've never heard that one.

DON

It's the kind of stuff that makes it to Facebook, and becomes real because it's on Twitter.

DICK

Yes, Facebook. Yeah. There's all these Facebook groups that are, you know, they're all under the radar. That’s the fracturing of the media. There's another factor in all this, and another factor, in way, of why this race is perhaps so close. Everybody's got their information silos now, it's not like in the old days where you had, you know, mainstream gatekeepers that everybody kind of abided by, Republicans and Democrats alike. So now everybody gets has their own sources of information. Some, let's just say, far better than others. And they and they abide by them. And, you know, other things just can't break through.

JOHN

Dick Coleman, thank you. I think what we'll do is we'll pick this up after the election and see how you survived, and how drunk you got, how many drugs you were forced to take, you know, which sanitarium they put you into and everything. It's one of the big things we're looking forward to in the post-election season.

DICK

Well, that's a deal. That's a deal.

JOHN

So, thank you for being with us on the Musical Innertube. I think we've had one of the most invigorating discussions of what's coming up that you can find. So, thank you for that.

DICK

Thank you, John. Thank you, Don.

DON

Thank you, Dick.