The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway
00:02:44 · Scott Galloway
[00:02:44] S0: I mean, alright. Kansas, first time in a hundred years they've sent a senator. Two things struck me. Well, a bunch of things, but the two I'll reference, and then I want to hear what struck you, is that one, South Carolina, what the data shows is that if they just put up someone and put an R next to their name that no one had ever heard of, and did not have Trump endorse this person or get near this person, that that person would have handily beat the Democrat. That it was Trump's association with Darlene and her de facto association with Trump vis a vis being Graham's sibling that basically sunk her. That if they had just said, Bob Smith, you've never heard of him, but he's a Republican, And Trump got nowhere near it. I mean, this is such a clear... I mean, we call it a blue tsunami. It was a tsunami, riptide. The other thing that I wanna point out is that, and this has been a big thing, men are a theme of mine. Young men are the swingiest swingers in voting. And that is they vote mostly on economic issues. And economic issues, on crime and immigration, Republicans are steadfastly seen as the better or the more serious party. On things like sometimes around what I'll call empathy, better tax policy, whatever you wanna call it, the Democrats pull stronger. Young men go with the economy and the economy flips back and forth. Sometimes people think that Republicans are better for the economy. Sometimes they think Democrats are better for the economy. And I'll come back to that because I have data on that. But if you look at what happened, if you look at who pivoted the hardest in this election, it is just striking what happened. And that is, if you look at white women, they went, they swung 11 points towards Dems this election. White non college swung 14 points. Black men swung 16 points back towards Democrats versus 24. Hispanic people, 28 points, young people, 32 swing. And then the biggest swing of any group, and arguably the biggest swing we have seen in any cohort in recent history in an election is males age 18 to 29 swung 38 points. So for those of you who have this lazy thinking that young men are just Neanderthals, not worth saving, who drag their knuckles along the ground, they're paying attention. They're focused on economics, so they can form households.
00:05:28 · Scott Galloway, George Hahn
They're less socially minded or less concerned, I should say, over geopolitics or social issues. They wanna know who's gonna give them the prosperity that their parents had. [00:05:40] S1: Republicans also lost ground with rural voters, the heart of their base. And in Florida and North Carolina, Democrats won in the same districts Republicans had redrawn to keep them out. Later in the livestream, Jessica Tarlov made sure to call out the irony of cheating and still losing.
00:06:01 · Jessica Tarlov
[00:06:01] S2: The rural vote was one of the most interesting facets of this race that was a particularly big deal in South Carolina. And once those numbers started trickling in, folks knew that it was going to be a a very bad night. Those are core Donald Trump voters. And J. D. Vance has posted this long, long tweet about what happened and saying, you know, it was the war in Iran, and even the president says this. He did some Israel blaming. It's very interesting to see, you know, those voices kind of converging. But he talked about traditional Republican voters leaving the cohort and what a shot across the bow this is for Republicans. And by no means does last night's results indicate to me that this coalition is now enduring on the Democratic side. I mean, there are, you know, people who definitely showed up to vote yesterday who may have no interest whatsoever in the Democratic ticket come 2028 if there are normal people on the Republican side of it. But the collapse of the rural vote was a huge storyline that every gerrymander ended up being a dummy mander. Those Florida numbers as they came in for Kathy Castor, for Jared Moskowitz, looking at North Carolina, didn't pick up one seat out of that. Like, they cheated so badly. How embarrassing to be that low and that corrupt and not even be able to pull it off.
00:07:25 · George Hahn
[00:07:25] S1: Some Republicans have been walking away from the party for a while. David Brooks spent most of his life as a conservative, and he doesn't recognize what the movement has become. On Thursday, we reaired his conversation with Scott where he traced the split back to his own early days on the right.
00:07:45 · David Brooks
[00:07:45] S3: Yeah. I I became a conservative in my twenties after being a police reporter in Chicago, and the two heroes for me were Edmund Burke, who was an Irish conservative statesman and philosopher, who believed that in epistemological modesty, the idea is the world is really complicated. And when we do change, we should do it constantly, but incrementally. And my other hero was Alexander Hamilton, who was a Puerto Rican hip hop artist from Upper Manhattan. Now... And so Alexander Hamilton believed that progressives believe in government to enhance equality, and libertarians believe in limited government to enhance freedom. Hamiltonianism believes in limited but energetic government to enhance social mobility. And so those are the two north stars for me. And, of course, over the course of the Trump administration, I've come to believe that whatever conservatism is, it's not what Trump is producing. He's producing reactionary politics, something completely different. And so I went back to those books that I used to read from Edinburgh and people like Isaiah Berlin and a guy named Michael Oakeshott, and I loved them all over again. I think the essential conservative truths are still very profound, but they are nothing like what is called conservatism today. There is nothing like Fox News. And I go back to one moment in my formation where now in retrospect, it looks like there's a crucial fork in the road. I came out of the University of Chicago, and I read Burke and Adam Smith and these books. And I worked in National Review, The Wall Street Journal editorial page, The Weekly Standard, and we believed in promulgating conservative ideas. At the same time I graduated from Chicago, there were a couple people graduating from Dartmouth who had worked at the Dartmouth Review. And people may recognize Laura Ingraham, Dinesh D'Souza, they were in this group. And I've come to see they were not pro conservative. They were anti left. They were in elite institutions, but they hated the progressive lean of those institutions. And so they were sort of the rebel bad boys. The defining feature of the Dartmouth Review was in 1986, some progressive students on Dartmouth's campus erected a a shantytown to protest apartheid. And in the middle of the night, the editors of Dartmouth Review, about a dozen of them, descended on the shantytown and took sledgehammers to them.
00:10:02 · David Brooks, George Hahn
And it was attempt to dismantle the left, really. And to me, it was like gestapo tactics. I was shocked and appalled because apartheid really is worth protesting. But I've come to see that difference between being pro conservative, which I would say John McCain was, Mitt Romney was, George W Bush was, and anti left, which is what Laura Loomer is, which is what Pete Hegseth is, what is what Vivek Ramaswamy is. That to me is a crucial difference. [00:10:28] S1: Our allies have been watching all of this too. On Tuesday's special conversations episode, Fareed Zakaria told Scott how countries like Canada and India are rethinking their relationship with The US and why that won't change overnight.