The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway
00:04:22 · Scott Galloway
[00:04:22] S3: And you had, I always watch your show, GPS, who said something that really stuck with me. And that is, generally speaking, the two parties, it was typically a smaller and smaller number of people were deciding elections in a smaller and smaller number of states. Now the biggest registration is among quote unquote independents. And that is we have never had as many quote unquote swing voters. Elections have never been this up for grabs. Talk more about that and what it means for today's election.
00:04:52 · Fareed Zakaria
[00:04:52] S4: So 45% of the American electorate is now independents, the highest number ever. And the most interesting in new data is around exactly what you said, the sort of malleability of voters. You know, we have this picture of America as totally polarized, tribal, people are in... Dug into their positions. They don't listen. They don't change their minds. And that is true, but it's true of a fairly narrow base on both sides of the of the spectrum. What you're now witnessing is this much larger group of independents who are beginning to to to shift. And in a way, Trump has, in some ways, made that happen by first bursting onto the scene, being this renegade Republican attracting a bunch of Democrats who weren't that interested in the party. But then, know, if I can be honest, screwing it all up, you know, particularly in the in the in the second term, massively under delivering Iran war tariffs, cost of living inflation, massive overdoing of the ICE immigration raids. And as a result, you're seeing people who had flocked to him move away almost as fast as they as they flocked. This is unusual. As you know, Scott, people often say about American politics, if you get a voter to vote twice for a party, they're usually locked in for life. Well, now what you see... Are seeing is a huge... You saw a huge Hispanic surge toward Donald Trump in '24, and all polling indicates that has collapsed. That is why if Texas goes to Talarico, it will be... The single biggest issue will be the collapse of Hispanic support. It's something like he's down close to 20 points from where he was in '24. But also Asian Americans, though they're they're not as significant, black Americans had a... There was a small surge among black men for Trump that seems to have collapsed. Young people, small surge for Trump. Not not so small, maybe 10 points, completely collapsed. We are back with young voters to the the split that we saw in o eight with Obama when Obama managed to get this huge number of young voters. So you see what I'm saying is you had a huge wave of people going toward Trump, but that wave is almost entirely receded. So could this be, you know, the new the new pattern? Large number of independents in the middle. They... You know, for idiosyncratic reasons, for ideological reasons, for god knows what reasons, they move back and forth.
00:07:30 · Fareed Zakaria, Scott Galloway
And so finally, we get we get back to actual contestation in American elections. This is what I'm hoping for. Because in this election, because of gerrymandering, there are only 38 competitive seats in the House of Representatives. It is quite possible that the supreme Soviet... The legislature of the Soviet communist system had a higher turnover in its legislature than the House of Representatives currently has among itself. [00:07:59] S3: But that is changing, no? That's what I'm hoping. South Carolina's in play. None of us would that would have been solid Republican just three months ago. Kansas is in play. [00:08:12] S4: And, you know, a lot of these... The gerrymandering could turn out to backfire. Again, we'll have to see how the results come out. But you see, what happened with gerrymandering is they they took a bunch of very solidly Republican seats. Seats Republicans would win by 20 points. And they turned them into two districts that Republicans would win comfortably by eight, nine points. But if you have a d plus 12 Democratic wave and it translates into 12 in that local district, well, all of a sudden, lost two Republican seats where you would have won the one. So, you know, gerrymandering also could backfire if you start to see genuine shifts and genuine, you know, malleability among voters.
00:08:12 · Fareed Zakaria, Scott Galloway
[00:08:12] S4: And, you know, a lot of these... The gerrymandering could turn out to backfire. Again, we'll have to see how the results come out. But you see, what happened with gerrymandering is they they took a bunch of very solidly Republican seats. Seats Republicans would win by 20 points. And they turned them into two districts that Republicans would win comfortably by eight, nine points. But if you have a d plus 12 Democratic wave and it translates into 12 in that local district, well, all of a sudden, lost two Republican seats where you would have won the one. So, you know, gerrymandering also could backfire if you start to see genuine shifts and genuine, you know, malleability among voters. [00:09:01] S3: In investing, we like to think there's such a thing as an uncorrelated asset. That if you buy Japanese bond, has nothing to do with buying, you know, Nvidia. And the reality is over time, everything's become somewhat correlated because of global media. And if the guy has to sell bonds in Japan, that probably means he has to sell some of his Nvidia stock to fund his margin call or whatever. I find that's true of politics too, that generally speaking, elections or themes, broader themes across the world are somewhat correlated. When you look across the world at recent elections and recent trends, does what's happening in America give you echoes of anything else that's happened around the world recently? What this election most like in other parts of the world that you've been observing?
00:09:50 · Fareed Zakaria
[00:09:50] S4: That's a great question. So I think that the general trend we have seen toward right wing populism is very much a global trend, as I was saying. And I think it's basically a reaction to thirty years of increasing acceleration technologically, economically, culturally. I mean, this is what I wrote my last book, Age of Revolutions, about. And it's a backlash against that. It's a bunch of people saying, stop. I wanna get off this train. I I don't want more globalization. I don't want more technological acceleration. I don't want more multiculturalism. Tough to do because all these societies have become what they have become, and you're not gonna be able to stop the clock. But that is the... You know, and and what the right does in situations like that often, this has happened historically, is offer a kind of politics of nostalgia. You know, I'll take you back to before all this turmoil, all this uncertainty. I'll take you back to a comforting place. You know, the most important word on Trump's slogan on his caps is again. Make America great again because it's sort of hearkening back to some utopia. And what I am... I think there is nothing right now going on globally that suggests... That that that, in a sense, echoes what might happen in America. America would be, I think, the trendsetter here because it would be the first time you got a break from that. Lula in Brazil was a little bit of that. And it's, by the way, an astonishing election. He he was down decisively in the first round. No Brazilian president has ever lost the first round and won the second round. He he shifted 10,000,000 votes in three weeks. And that was a whole bunch of different reasons, but that's the the only precursor I can think of. But I think this one is much more important because it is really fundamentally about this issue. Okay, the right wing nostalgia sounds great, but can it deliver? And what you're seeing fascinatingly is that the issues that we would wonder, Scott, why people are not more worried about, the corruption, the abuse of executive authority, they have finally started to bubble up because, in a way, they get tied to people's personal situations and to practical issues people are concerned about. Jon Ossoff has done this very well by linking the corruption to the affordability crisis.
00:12:27 · Fareed Zakaria
You can't afford, you know, groceries, but the the the Trump family and cronies are are making billions. You know? That kind of rhetorical ploy where making these connections seems to have worked. The abusive executive authority wasn't making much headway until people started to see ICE agents firing on people, arresting people with with very dubious explanations for why those people were suspicious. So I think you're finally seeing a kind of human connection to the misgovernment that the that the Trump people have have represented. And so in a way, it may be, you know, this would be this would be the trendsetter. I wouldn't be surprised if if this happens in The United States and you get a genuine blue wave, does it does it make people at the center everywhere think, you know what? There is a path forward. Now a lot will depend on what the Democrats do after. Do they take advantage of this and fashion a kind of viable energetic centrism? Or do they go to the far left? Do they, you know, do their identity politics? Do they, you know, do they kind of fulfill all these progressive fantasies, which in my opinion would turn people off, and and there's fairly good polling data on this. A majority of Democrats think the Democratic Party should be in the center or not not in the, you know, in the in the far left. But... So, you know, you can't just be... Right now, there's a kind of an anti Trump... Right now, there's an anti Trump atmosphere. To translate that into a governing majority, you need to be able to fashion something that people can be affirmatively in favor of.