Hey, everybody. Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from my covered prison, also known as the Home Office. And we’re to close out our three parter on the upcoming elections with a disco version of the forgotten middle child of American politics, the independents, and how they are going to be determining the outcome of this race and how they’ve really already made up their mind.

The key thing to remember about independents is that they’re not part of the rest of the process and as a result, they feel a little annoyed, a little left out, and they keep getting presented with this binary choice between two horrible candidates and they have to plug their nose and vote for someone. However, they don’t do it in the way that you might imagine that a normal balancing factor would where they look at all the pros and look at all the cons and talk about it among themselves, and then they have a very knee jerk reaction.

It’s very predictable. They’re flighty, they have buyer’s remorse, and they almost always vote against whoever they voted for the last time. And it goes pretty much like clockwork. So they voted to put Obama into the office and they voted to bring him out of the office when he was up for reelection. The same happened for Bush. The same happened for Trump.

They voted him in because he wasn’t Obama. And then they voted against him because he was Trump. And they’ve done this over and over and over over throughout American history. And it’s one of the reasons why you usually see really big swings in the midterm election where the ruling party tends to lose a lot of seats in Congress.

While that didn’t happen this last time, when we got to the 2021 elections, the independents on their exit polling indicated that they really disliked Biden, specifically his economic policies, and very specifically that those economic policies were very bad for independents in general. And yet And yet. And yet. And yet, instead of generating the red wave, which history suggests happens almost every single time, or sorry, the opposition wave, they instead voted to keep the Democrats in the majority in the Senate, and they handed the Republicans the smallest majority they have ever seen in the last 180 years in the House.

Since then, the Republicans have managed to winnow that down even further because they ejected a guy who was using campaign funds to pay for porn. And the Republican while the far right, if you want to call it that, the populist right, the moderate, caused such a ruckus within the Republican caucus, within the Congress that they basically ejected their own speaker.

They didn’t just get McCarthy out of the speakership. They convinced him to quit Congress altogether, shrinking the majority even more. Now, why did this happen? Well, it comes down to Donald Trump. Donald Trump’s position in that the January six protests were about the real democracy. The idea that the election was stolen from him, even though there’s absolutely no facts at all that supported that.

And we now have almost every candidate who’s even running for president against him on the Republican side now saying that publicly. Remember, not a single court case was won. No, no, no. Cases of voter fraud were found. And all that resonates with independents. Just doesn’t that resonate with MAGA and Trump? What Trump is basically telling the independents is that the general election doesn’t matter.

And all of the decisions that should be made on American leadership should be made at the caucus in the primary level where he will dominate. And that means if you are an independent, you don’t have a voice. And they’re like, the hell I don’t. And so they showed up for a midterm, something they normally don’t do, and they voted against their own perceived best economic interests to vote in candidates who were anti Trump.

So they’ve broken with the pattern that has held true for the last several decades. And since Donald Trump hasn’t changed his tune on what went down in his general election, I think it’s pretty safe to say that the independents are not going to either. Let me give you an idea of how this is going to play out. This map here is what will happen if the independents split their vote evenly among the Democratic and the Republican coalition candidates.

Joe Biden, Trump. You’ll notice that if you add up those numbers, you can see in the bottom left how it breaks down that the Republicans need to swing a fair number of independents. So a 5050 split doesn’t work for them. They need to garner at least two thirds, preferably three quarters of the independents, in order to switch a lot of these purple states to red.

That’s not what we’re going to see. More likely, what we’re going to see is a repeat of what happened in the 2022 by elections. It’s going to replicate itself in the 2024 general elections, and that’s something more like this second map where the independents brief 2 to 1 in favor of anti-Trump candidates and favor Democratic candidates. And if this is what goes down, Donald Trump will be leading his party to the second or third greatest electoral feat in American history.

Now, you may say, well, that’s not what the polls are saying. The polls are saying that Joe Biden is so unpopular that Trump is actually trending towards a direct victory in a lot of states. Keep in mind, independents don’t participate in polls and certainly not a year ahead of time. Any poll that is further out than two or three months from the election is probably crap anyway.

But one in which the independents have no vested interest in playing. So I would just kind of toss that out to the side. What happens after is what’s going to get really interesting here. So what do you watch for moving forward? Well, you got to watch the people. If you consider that folks from the national security in the business community and the fiscal conservatives really have never been warm to Trump.

In fact, many of them have campaigned against Trump and vice versa. If you look at the world from their point of view, when Trump leads the Republicans to a defeat in this next election, it will be five electoral cycles. Since they have had one of their people in the White House. That has got to trigger some soul searching and some assessment as to what’s next and if we’re going to get a split in either party, it is probably going to be the Republicans and it is probably going to be because of this legacy of defeat.

And that will most likely lead them to break away and do something else. Some may become Democrats, some may form a new centrist party. Some may lead a direct rebellion against Trumpism. But those are the people who have the agency and the most reason to seek something out. Now, folks like Mitt Romney have decided to withdraw from the fight and leave it to the next generation.

So we’re going to be looking for people predominantly under age 55 who are trying to find a new way to function in this sort of environment, because the alternative is to simply never be in power again. And if there’s one thing I know about politicians that is ever the goal.

Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from the winter wonderland that is snowy Colorado. Today we’re talking about why Donald Trump has no chance of winning the general election, assuming he’s not disqualified, assuming that he’s not in jail. Okay, So you have to look at the way our electoral system works. We have a first past the post single member district system, which is a fancy way of saying that you vote for one person who is representing a very distinct geographic area.

It’s not like the Netherlands where you vote for a party. You’re voting for one specific person. And what that does is it encourages our parties to further to only be two of them and for them to be very big tent parties because they need to get that marginal vote more than whoever is running on the other side. It’s all about numbers of votes.

That’s one of the reasons why whenever we do get a third or fourth party that never lasts for more than one or two political cycles and then other parties fall out, we go back to the two. I’m not saying that can’t happen this time around, but we’re getting really late in the day for it to affect this election.

Maybe the next one. Anyway, first past the post. So if you’re going to have a big tent party, that means you’re going to have a lot of power centers, a lot of factions within each party, and those factions are going to rise and fall in political power as technology and geopolitics and social issues evolve. And we’ve certainly seen that in the last 30 years.

We’ve had hyper globalization, that we now have globalization. We’ve had the rise of the information economy and now social media. We’ve had the baby boomers being in their prime to the baby boomers now retiring in mass. We are going through one of these transitions. So it’s really important to understand where all the factions are, especially as related to each other youth in their own political party.

So, for example, Republicans versus Democrats, the Republicans have always had a numerical disadvantage because they just don’t have as many voters. They don’t have as many factions. You’ve got the pro-lifers, the military voters, the law and order voters, business voters, for example. And the reason that this faction, despite having fewer numbers than the Democrats, has always done relatively well, is because their issues in play typically don’t clash.

The pro-lifers really don’t care about business regulation. The business community really doesn’t care about military policy and so on. So you have a smaller coalition, but a very solid coalition, a very reliable coalition, and everybody shows up to vote every time. And so even though they don’t have as many members, you know what you’re going to get in each electoral cycle.

And if you can pull a few independents, you’re good to go. The Democrats have a different sort of system. They’ve thrown a very, very wide net indeed. And I’m oversimplifying here a little bit, but they basically a three part coalition minority is coastal, highly educated elites and organized labor. And the problem with that coalition is when you start running on the issues and talking about the specifics of policy during the campaign, it’s very difficult to have anything that all three of those factions agree upon.

So for example, those coastal educated elites, in order to get rid of racism, they started coming up with new terms to call people, which, you know, we usually call racist, but whatever. Anyway, next is my personal favorite has no root in any Latin culture. And something like 97% of Hispanics find it either pointless or a little offensive, but they tried to push it anyway.

And so you’ve got a split on social issues among those two groups. Another great example is the Green Revolution, which obviously the coastal educated folks are really big on. But the unions are not so much because most of those jobs are not going to be unionized. So whenever you get a candidate who is a little brainy and who runs on the issue, someone like Michael Dukakis or Hillary Clinton, you know, tries to make practical pledges during a campaign, you’re going to start a internecine fight and they’re going to have entire chunks of the Democratic electorate that just don’t show up at all.

And it’s very hard to win that way. What they need to win is a charismatic candidate who doesn’t really talk about anything real at all. And that’s why Barack Obama did so well. So this is the day that we have been facing for the last 30, 40, 50, 60, 70 years. Now, under normal circumstances, the Republicans have an advantage here because there are very few issues that are wedge issues within their own coalition.

But what Donald Trump has done is shake it up the race and introduced a number of wedge issues, not just across society but across the Republican electorate. And we now have any number of candidates who are I don’t know if say that are in Trump’s pocket is the how about in Trump’s corner? There we go that really break up the decision making process for voters.

So my personal favorite or I love to hate the most was Tommy Tuberville, who for months this year prevented military promotions in order to get his way on abortion policy. Those are two factions military voters and abortion voters who never had anything to fight about before. And all of a sudden they’re at each other’s necks. He’s so little.

Trump has driven the business community out of the coalition because he basically doesn’t like it when people tell him no or when they say yes. But, Mr. President, he wanted the adoration. That was it. And so you have the business community that is now completely alienated from the social conservative voters. And in that sort of environment, the Republicans are facing a Democratic style cohesion contest.

The problem here is that the Republicans don’t have as many voters as the Democrats. And even if they pass the cohesion test, then they have to deal with all the other things that Donald Trump brings to the table. So they’re not going to have their entire coalition showing up if Donald Trump becomes the candidate and that means just on the numbers, there’s no way that Donald Trump can win.

And that’s before you consider the independents were to do that in a different video.

Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from Colorado. It is. It’s the 6th of January and I was going to try to ignore this, but I’m kind of in the same position as the Supreme Court. So here we go. Today, the US Supreme Court indicated that it would hear Trump’s challenge to Donald Trump’s challenge to a Colorado Supreme Court ruling that says that he can’t run because he is guilty of insurrection.

What’s going on here is that in the aftermath of the Civil War, a series of constitutional amendments were passed while the South were not present. And so when they receded under reconstruction, they had to adopt them. And among the clauses of those constitutional amendments was one. The Insurrection Clauses says that if you participated in any sort of uprising against the U.S. government, you are immediately disqualified from seeking office at any level in the U.S. government and back during the days of reconstruction, that meant that tens of thousands of people could never be in public service again.

The Colorado Supreme Court has ruled 4 to 3 that Donald Trump meets those criteria, and therefore he can never run for any office ever again. And they disqualified him. Trump obviously is challenging that ruling at the Supreme Court level. Now, the Supreme Court right now, our chief justice has gone by the name of John Roberts, and he has bent over backwards his entire professional career to not not, not, not, not make waves.

His theory of jurisprudence is that laws should be made by the legislators, whether at the state level or the Congress level. And it is the job of the court to have as light of a touch as possible because ultimately they weren’t elected. It was the legislators that were elected and they are the voice of the people. So the court should only rule when it doesn’t have a choice.

It should try to focus on the most technical of arguments rather than the political ones. But now that we have a former president that is basically challenging the law of the land for one of the states, the Supreme Court has no choice but to get involved. Now on the merits of the case, I’m not going to offer an opinion because I am absolutely not a legal scholar.

I will only point out two things. Number one, who runs for office, how that’s regulated, how elections are managed. That is all a state level prerogative. The federal government has nothing to do with that. The United States is a federal system, which means there’s a balance of powers and responsibilities between the national government, the state government, the local government.

And it says very clearly in the Constitution that it’s up to the states how they do things. So in Donald Trump challenging this, he’s basically saying that elections should be a federal prerogative and no one should be able to tell him what he can and cannot do. Now, that’s kind of funny. If you look back at the ideology of the Republican Party and the movement that Donald Trump has assumed leadership of and understand, that would take a big step back to kind of dissect the second piece.

If you’re looking for a real reason why we’ve gotten into this mess, it’s our fault because we tried to clean up politics over the last 25, 30 years. We had something called campaign finance reform. And the idea was that we need to know where the money is coming from. So then when it gets into the political system, it doesn’t overly color it or generate corruption in the old system.

Most of the political money that flowed through the system came from just a few thousand people, relatively wealthy people, folks that generally had a foot in business. And this generated a very slick ish, very schmoozer and yes, somewhat corrupt political system, because you would have people at every level of government who, to a certain degree, were beholden to someone in a suit.

Now, the people who were in the suits, as a rule, being in the business community, they cared about regulation, they cared about rule of law, they cared about economic growth. These are overall not bad things. But it did mean that they these folks who gave the money had the ear of a lot of politicians. And so what would happen is you’d have this kind of schmooze system where a lot of work was done in the back rooms.

Government moved forward and it generally was more interested in continuity and stability than radical change. It certainly didn’t want to burn down the structures in order to make a progressive change happen. It was all about things being done with a degree of responsibility, even if it wasn’t very clean. Well, with campaign finance reform, everyone all of a sudden had a limit for how much they could put into the political system personally, and it had to be reported.

And so we saw more and more people giving money, but at a much lower number. And at the same time, we were making that legal change. We had the information revolution and the start of social media. So the transaction costs for playing in the political system went from giving a few million dollars to a few thousand dollars to a few dollars whose transaction costs went to zero.

And so we’ve gone from a system where a small number of people are beholden to a bunch of folks with money who have an interest in running the system to a very different system where instead of thousands of donors, there’s millions of donors who have just given a few bucks each and that money flows instead of to a party to specific personalities and movements.

So we’ve gone from a schmoozing system that’s somewhat corrupt, that still get stuff done and believe in stability to a system where any politician can raise money on their own and they have a vested interest in screaming and burning the house down because it gets people to click and donate five bucks. Both of them are corrupt in their own way.

One was a lot more functional. I’ll leave it to you to decide which one’s worse. Now, how does that deal with what’s going on at the Supreme Court here? Well, the movement that Donald Trump has assumed command of you could call the states right group if you want to. The idea that the federal government should be shrunk and it should be up to the state governments to decide what happens.

But here, Donald Trump and his supporters are taking the exact opposite of that position, saying that the states shouldn’t have the ability to regulate the elections. That should come from the national level. It’s kind of ironic, but Donald Trump has never been known for being ideologically consistent. Now what happens next? What happens next is we’re all going to get really riled up because the Supreme Court said they’re going to make the ruling in the first half of February, which is in plenty of time for things to get moving before the Republican convention happens in March.

Now, the thing that comes here, the thing that’s really important is the convention itself. In the days before campaign finance reform, the political system was all at the state level. You’d have your Iowa Republicans and your Kentucky Democrats and whoever else, and each party would run their own states the way they saw fit. And then once every four years, they would come together.

The national convention, and jointly nominate and vote on to support a common standard bearer for the presidency. Campaign finance reform made that system a lock. The individual ability to raise funding changed. Now, that’s started with Barack Obama, you know, change. And he basically ran in parallel to his party and won the presidency without being beholden to the party.

Donald Trump, of course, came in and took that to the extreme and even to a certain degree, ran against his own party, not just for the nomination, but for the presidency itself. Well, folks, the states have lost their lock on that system, which means based on how the Supreme Court rules here, we’re going to have a scramble on both sides of the aisle because it’s clear that Donald Trump can’t run.

If that’s how this goes, then all of a sudden we are in a real election again. Joe Biden is wildly, wildly unpopular, and it doesn’t take much of imagination to find a non Trump candidate who might be able to beat him on the other side. Donald Trump is wildly, wildly unpopular and Biden can easily beat him. Deal with that in the next video.

So if we have a month to figure out where the real candidates are, it’s going to be a blitzkrieg with Donald Trump at the back of the room screaming the whole time. Alternatively, if the Colorado court ruling is in some way overturned and Donald Trump is allowed to run, he has zero chance of winning the presidency. But to explain that we’re going to need another video or two.