Ep. 2801 The GOP's Young People Problem, and What Should Be Done

0:00Get ready to take a flame thrower to the official narrative and learn what the elites don't want you to know. You're listening to The Tom Woods Show. Everybody Tom Woods here, it's episode 2801 of The Tom Woods Show, the great rich barris independent pollster, the people's pundit is back with us and I had said before that when the book came out, he had to come back and the book is out, burn it down. What the polls say young Americans really want. Let's start first rich with where I thought you were going at the very beginning. The first chapter is two movies on one screen where I thought you were going with that is that sometimes it seems like half of America and the other half live in two different realities. Like we're looking at the same elephant and we're describing in completely different ways and yet the facts are all there and for some reason we come up with such radically different interpretation.

1:00I mean, there are people who think there's a quote trans genocide going on and I don't understand what reality they're in. So I thought that's where you were going, but instead it was more of a people are having two different kinds of experiences in America today that there are some people who are doing quite well, but there are a lot of people who are frustrated, who feel like they've been made promises that weren't kept. And in particular, what really stuck with me rich was the statistic you found about the percentage of young people, I don't know the exact ages, but 18 to 20 something, a very substantial, not a majority, but a very substantial percentage of them agreed with the statement that more or less you could describe my life as a failure. Yeah. So let's start there. What is two movies on one screen? So this is a borrowing because let me just give people a little bit of history and my work as, and I am an independent pollster and maybe some people don't know this, but also I get hired quite a bit to do what is essentially modern day for a deer to target juries to decide,

2:03okay, you want that juror, you don't want that juror, this is the kind of juror you want. That's some of the most fascinating work that I do, but in that work, I absolutely realized how to apply that in a political space. It's the great Scott Adams. He was right about this that our life experiences, it's not that party, of course, and our ideology to do not inform how we see the world, but our life experiences explain the filter through which we perceive the world. And we tell ourselves stories based on the belief systems that are constructed through those life experiences. And interestingly enough, there's a massive difference. And I mean, I think you would expect it, but we don't talk about it. There's a massive difference in that filter between generations and the experience that older voters had versus what younger voters, the experienced younger voters have, which I will detail quite a bit in the book. Now, we have these characterizations and stereotypes that we placed on generations,

3:04whether you're talking about boomers, we certainly have, they have their stereotypes, or whether we're talking about young zoomers or millennials. And often more often than not, Tom, I mean, because we want people to see the world, the way that we do, we rely on those stereotypes and it prevents us from being able to understand that effectively in the American experience in modern day America, there are very different. We are watching the same movie, that is this country, but we are seeing different stories effectively. And because I guess what I'm trying to say is, in the beginning of the book, I wanted to try before anything to get even zoomers to understand how boomers may see the world and boomers understand how everyone else, because it's really as boomers versus everybody else. It is. It is. The boomers have their experience that they came up in this country with and that informs why they see things the way they do. Everyone else tried to understand that, but at the same time, boomers, you added very different than ever, including Gen X. Right?

4:04We're not focusing too much on Gen X. And because there's reasons for that, we can get into, but it's where they really fell on the generational ladder. The golf has grown, the gap between these experiences has grown to the part where it's not reconcilable. So we have to understand it if we're going to try to address it and fix it, move forward together here. You have some numbers about people identifying as conservative and what age groups they fall in by and large. And so the point you're making is that over time, the way the grim reaper operates, a lot of the people who today say they're conservative won't be with us anymore. And the younger folks who don't lean as much that way are going to be more dominant. But isn't there a countervailing trend that over time, we typically see that as people age, they get more conservative. So maybe this isn't as stagnant as it might look. So basically, and not to pick a fight with them, here we're taking on Sean Trendy over real clear politics who have for many, many years. And I remember when I was writing this book and researching for this book, and even

5:07formulating questions to what I knew would be addressed. These arguments that I would be addressed with the research results that we found, there is that argument. And somebody like Sean Trendy would argue, you know, the people who voted for or against Richard Nixon during the Vietnam War actually are pretty Republican now. And we can look at other examples of that. The unfortunate truth is that was oversimplified. And even if we take boomers, for instance, they didn't really grow up in total to be that conservative like Silent Gen's War. So we even see it from the Silent Gen to the Boomers, a reduction in conservative identification. And we break boomers up and we should, because it's true, boomers aren't monolithic. We break boomers into boomer one and boomer two. And boomers are sometimes known as the Jones boomers, you know, keeping up with the Joneses. Boomer one was, and this is again, remember experience, life experience. Boomer one, because of their age, were drafted into the Vietnam War, many of them actually

6:11even volunteered. And they were still like red, white, and blue flag waving, born on the 4th of July, I think Tom Cruise, all right, and born on the 4th of July. But think Tom Cruise before he loses his legs and turns into a liberal, all right. He goes out, he willingly fights the Vietnam War. It's, yes, I believe the Domino's theory and America is just can do no wrong. They don't lie about the Gulf of Tomkin, they don't lie about the Domino's theory. Then you have Boomer two. And by the way, Boomer one, yes, is more conservative. And then you have Boomer two, which is basically Tom Cruise's younger brother. And because of his age, I mean, it's not his fault and his fault of his own, he dodged the draft, you know, missed it. He didn't get stuck fighting the Vietnam War. And this class went heavily to professional credential class jobs because they went to college and they grew up in a very hard left turning academia. So while Boomer one definitely, they accumulated well faster than millennials are in Zoomers are. So young people don't take this wrong way. I don't mean it like this.

7:12But even they were in a Boomer one was not as credentialed in the way that we saw Boomer two and they weren't immersed in its indoctrination. As much as we saw Boomer two who would come after them. So they grew up and they birthed this managerial class that in many ways would go on to create a system that is effectively designed to cater for that. And Boomer one, I mean, this system is built to cater to the economic and social needs of this generation. And you can't put it past. You can't really put a blame on it, Tom. I mean, that's what groups do. The world evolves or revolve around them for four decades. So they kind of took what they thought was rightfully theirs and they made the world in their image. But they did so without thinking about the generations that would come after them. And the world that they produced, blunt it those trends that you're talking about. So because it is true, but unfortunately what happens, it's not only that you're aging and you're getting more conservative.

8:13But other factors are related to this getting married and having children, owning a home. Even by the way, this is a process called political maturation, even enlisting in the military. For instance, so you'll see why Boomer one was so much more conservative. There are various life experiences and life goals or milestones that I don't want to say force it. But at least we can see a relationship that when voters hit them as they age, it makes them more conservative. You'll see old Winston Churchill quote, if you're not a liberal when you're young and you're heartless, if you're not a conservative when you're older, you don't have a brain list, right, or however he put it. But it's much more nuanced and much more complicated than that. And because of the world that the Boomer's created, they created obstacles to people hitting those milestones to go through the political maturation process. And that is making them, I won't say less conservative. I think the better word is it's making them less labeled. So these, especially the younger people in that paragraph that starts out talking about

9:17those 18 to 29 year olds and what we can infer from it, looking back, just doing a regression. We can see that unfortunately it's not just a given that these people get older and start to identify as conservative. It's much more likely because we're already seeing the trend as a graph in the book showing people. We look like we peaked and conservative identification has peaked and it peaked in an election and we lost, by the way, folks, which is unbelievable and that is 2020. And now it's been on the downtrend again ever since and I don't know what's going to stop that because there aren't those milestones ahead of these generations to get them to naturally progress into being more conservative and risk adverse. It's untrateratory time and we don't know where this, well, I have an idea and that's the second part of the book. But in America, we haven't seen this before. Well, I'm only on chapter two at this point in advancing the argument here, but in chapter two, you've got so many indicators that to somebody like me are very bad news, whereas

10:18to the other half of America, they would be very encouraging about the trends in terms of public opinion on issues that are very important to me about the economy, about where you'd like to see the economy go, what direction you'd like to see things going. And I know this isn't your point. Your point is to report to us what people are thinking. Yet as somebody who deals in ideas every day, I want to yell at the book. I want to say, look, the most capitalist parts of the healthcare system are the ones with the lowest costs. I mean, the direct primary care practices, you can get, you know, what, 50, 100 bucks a month, you get everything you need. There's crowd health, which I use, which saves me a fortune on unhealthy. I mean, if people knew how to look, you could actually, I don't want to sound like that person who says, you don't have to eat steak. You can eat chicken and get your protein. I'm not saying that. I'm saying that even after everything they've done to undermine healthcare in America, you can still find ways around everything they've done. But everything they've done is anti-capitalist. But I mean, that's not the point. The point is this is the information people think they have.

11:19And these are the conclusions they're drawing from it. And some of these people decided to vote for Mamdani for mayor of New York City. And interestingly, you point out in the book that the Mamdani vote was not, if we look at what people were saying about it, was not actually a referendum on Trump. Like we're going to stick it to Trump by voting for Mamdani. That by and large people weren't thinking that way. A lot of them weren't even thinking ideologically. They were thinking something's got to change here. And this guy sounds different from everybody else. So we're going to vote for him. Which should sound familiar to everybody. And it's stunning that anybody was surprised. And you know, oh, he's an Islamist. I don't know. They don't care about that. You know, he's a socialist. Well, to them, not being able to pay your rent and ending up homeless is far more scary than somebody's throwing a name at you like socialism. It just is. And that's a label. And again, a lot of these voters reject these labels. And just the first thing you said, because I'm getting, I am getting a lot of calls, a lot of messages. And my advice would be keep reading because yes, if you're in like chapter two and three,

12:25even for it's concerning. Yeah. I'm going to, and I don't have any comforting news to you until you maybe start to get the chapter eight because I'm trying. I absolutely am trying to say, are you concerned? Good. You should be because we have to be. We're at a time to recognize what's going on. Trump's administration was supposed to be the turning point. It was supposed to be the pivot point. And we did the exact opposite of what we needed to do. In fact, we exacerbated this problem. And my fear has always been that if we didn't, it's a Abraham Maslow stuff, hierarchy and needs. If we didn't at least start to address their basic needs at a point in their life when other generations have been able to say, yes, I met those milestones. I met that marker in life. If we can't do that, they're going to look for another champion to do that. And in fact, we already saw it in the New York City mayoral race. And your combo's out there talking about basically holding Israel first rallies. And it's just like stunning.

13:26Nobody in New York was trying to make Israel the number one talking point. And they wanted to make Mamdani's views on Israel the number one thing to run against. And it's like, people just want you to talk about their needs. They first, you know, who else was fresh and somebody different, right? Barack Obama after the Bush years. And people looked at him like, how could anyone vote for this guy? And he's too radical. He's crazy. Look at his hairstyle in college and he snorted coke and, you know, his mother's nuts. And he has socialist people as his mentors. And he started his senate career with terrorists in the living room of terrorists in Chicago. Nobody cares. Nobody cares, right, Winger? They care about paying their bills. They care about someone. And I don't know if you got there yet, but a mother who didn't hardly ever vote, right? And she came out in 24 and voted for Trump. She's one of the reasons why Donald Trump did better with educated women, even though he really didn't, if they were the same educated women who voted in 2020, it would barely, very little, have moved the market.

14:27There weren't that many defections in her age group. Her voting changed the margin. Her voting that she or act of her saying, I believe in this guy, I will take a risk and vote for him, even though I really don't think the process is worth even participating. And she's worried about getting back to school clothes for her children. She's worried about keeping the food in the refrigerator and throwing socialists at, you know, well, you can't vote for the enemy on the other side. They're the enemy. They're socialists. To somebody like this woman, she would say, well, if they were such a threat, then why didn't you care about me? Why didn't you put me first? And my concern is that this process that we're going through, and it's a pendulum swing, and we've heard American politics describe like that before. I'm seeing the pendulum swinging very fast and looking like it's going to break and fly out of the Kuku clock over the grandfather clock. This is getting worse and worse. And the next person that they pick because they think that this person will shake up the system may very well be the end of us.

15:29It enrages me to hear an effect. I'm sorry, look, if you're a boomer, listening, you know that we're not talking about you, right? We're talking about boomers as a category. So it's like the old meme about the height of the average woman is five. That's right. The woman comes along and says, how can that be? I'm five seven. I know there are, that's why we have averages. But when I say a boomer argument, I mean so often I hear, as you say, the boomer responsible so and so is a socialist. So what? To most people, socialism means sharing, you know, like that's to them. That's what it means. Socialism means people get taken care of. Carey about the little guy. Or they'll say, oh, while socialism led to a hundred million deaths, they're going to say, come on. Really making sure that grandma can go to the hospital when she's sick leads to a hundred million. Get out of here. You're not being reasonable. So there's been an extremely poor effort to respond to this. It's like, as you say, they think throwing a word around is going to win the argument,

16:29like racism for the left. Just say that word and that wins the argument. Socialist doesn't win the argument. Tell me what led your politics is and why we should be concerned about it. And I was just, what you just said, it's, you're getting close to led your politics, which is, yeah. And when you're doing this, what you're effectively trying to do is mimic the left's grievance, politics strategy. And you're never going to out grievance the left guys. Okay. So when you're keeping a ledger of right or wrongs or who did this and who did that, you're effectively going down the left wing path. And that's not, the right doesn't operate that way. And it doesn't operate its best when it's trying to mimic the left. When you're keeping tabs of who's right or wrong, so we can later call for reparations on somebody or something like that, it doesn't feel authentic. I guess this is how, what I'm trying to say. Look at Donald Trump. And again, I mean, he's a great example of trying to haunt, he's a cheerleader for what the right stands for. He was. He's a cheerleader for what the right stands for. And he did it so well.

17:30Ronald Reagan, whether you grade with him on every issue or not, same things. And a lot of the new right look back at Reagan and say, well, actually, he was wrong about this. He was wrong about that. But he didn't keep a ledger of right or wrongs. And he was just trying to build as big of a tent as he possibly can. And to me, the Trump 24 coalition, that was as a pollster, which Tom said, you know, if you're a boomerlist and this isn't you. Well, I mean, statistics is about generalizations. So this is where I'm going with this. But Trump, he cheerled for that in a way where you could increase your vote share with Muslims and Jews at the same election without keeping a list of who is right and who is wrong or keeping tabs on history and grievances. So later they come back to punish you when things go off the rails and the last. And in the later chapter, we'll talk about the danger of ledger politics because it comes back when these regimes who are promising to meet everyone's basic needs take over, that ledger comes out again, Tom. And then people get punished. And that is not what we want to do.

18:32And we don't want to be a part of that. Of course, the right should not be. But this is the disappointment, the great disappointment of Trump. He can go out there and raise his urban vote share and he can raise his his rural vote share, right? He can go out there and raise his white vote share and raise black and Hispanic vote share. And as a pollster, it's not just about building a bigger coalition. What I see when I see that is more unity, right? He's not winning based on, you know, and I'm not using this term in the way the right normally uses it. He's not trying or victimization is better than grievances. He's not winning on trying to pick someone's victimization or certain groups of victimization out or playing to what they think they're a victim. He's winning by playing to everyone's possibilities and everyone's opportunity. And that creates some more stable society when you can bridge urban with rural, when you can bridge black versus white. And then we have a chance to actually make some real progress. The left is the one who dices the job and keeps that list and checks it twice, three,

19:33four, five times. And then for ever, it's an infinite checking process. They do that. We don't do that. And we can't win like that. It's not who we are. Hey gang, every day potential customers are searching online for businesses like yours. If they can't find you, they're finding your competitors instead. That's where persist marketing comes in. For more than 15 years, they've helped local businesses rank higher on Google, show up in Google Maps, and run paid advertising campaigns that bring in real phone calls instead of just burning through budget. They're also helping businesses get found in AI search, including chat GPT, perplexity, and Google's AI overviews. As more people use AI to find local services, showing up there is becoming just as important as showing up on Google. Whether you're a contractor, an attorney, a medical practice, or another small business, persist marketing helps you get found where your customers are actually searching. The persist dot marketing, that's persist dot marketing, or call 770 580 3736 to schedule

20:36your free consultation. Okay, but we are, it is what we're facing increasingly. And I think one of the points you make is that in an optimistic society, and society that at least has the perception that there's economic growth and opportunity taking place, that they've come to absorb and understand that that is the way the system works, that my generation be better up in the previous one, is less likely to be taken in by that. But unfortunately, that's not where public perception is right now. So how does latter politics work then? So this is what the right has to deal with them. Let me just preface that by saying the difference between the new right and the old right is that the new right is not afraid when they're in power. They're not afraid of it. It's not against their, let this, their ideological litmus tests. They're not afraid to use the power that people just gave them to make other people's lives better. And a great example of this is a great example of latter politics is the vice president

21:36and his push on Ivanka had something similar in the first administration to help working families. And immediately, conservative is old guard, and I don't even want to call them conservatives because in truth, they're really not. They didn't conserve anything. They failed miserably. I'm not even sure that's the correct way. Let's call them the old right. Immediately, the reaction is, okay, that's a socialist idea. That's big government. You're talking about big government. There's nothing wrong because the system is so handicapped. There's nothing wrong with using the power people entrusted to help people move up that ladder. Now, once it would be great, and in a perfect world, we would just have a natural political maturation process where the economy was built on meritocracy, and we stayed virtuous to it, and we stayed true to our virtues, and it was more like a virtue capitalism kind of system. That's not the system we live in. And people, we're going to need to do this to help people up that ladder and have reality. Or, the left will promise that they'll do it.

22:38And the left will win these elections. They doesn't make you any less the right way. In fact, that is the way people, when they are voting for you, they expect that from you. They just expect it. And unfortunately, and throw out one of the, I don't know if you got there yet, I don't want to give anything away. But some of the statistics, because I know a lot of older voters out there will be listening. And you say, that's nonsense. They can do it if they work harder if they do this, if they do that. I don't want to give away too much, but it's simply not true. You had programs that represent ladder politics. You had social security. You had the great, not only the New Deal, you had the Lyndon Johnson agenda. You had these points in your life where you were going through the maturation process, where government gave you a hand up. Now that is built towards benefiting those who got it at that time. And the younger generation is just left somehow footing the bill for it, which is impossible when they don't have the same. And I'm telling you, again, I don't want to give it away to you, Tom, but it's there.

23:42The numbers are there. I mean, you had it somewhat. You had more opportunities. I want to say easier. But more opportunity than they have. They have much larger barriers. And their income is just not keeping up the way that yours kept up. Even mine, just to say, like I'm even speaking, I'm an older millennial, but I'm on the very high end of millennia. I could, you know, at one point I could have been considered a Gen X, even Zoomers compared to me. My income kept pace a lot better. A lot, you know, it was more satisfactory to me as I was coming into the workforce than it is for Zoomers. And I think we all need to recognize that. That have a little empathy for them. Well, I want to throw a little curveball at you here because there are particular grievances that white men specifically have in America, but they're not allowed to name them because of the way American discourse takes place. You're not allowed to say white men have interests of their own, even though you are allowed to say white men are collectively guilty for all kinds of terrible things. That's okay.

24:42So they can be assigned all kinds of wickedness, but they can't have interests because that's racism, quote unquote. So they're arguing with one hand tied behind their backs. But as we know from journalism that's been done over the past year, the extent to which DEI deprived white men of jobs is beyond anything people could possibly imagine. You think, oh, it's just along the edges. It's just a little fringe here and there. We're just trying to give people a leg up or disadvantage. That is not even remotely what happened. So let's say white man in his 20s and 30s, who is remotely aware of the extent to which DEI robbed him of opportunities is somebody who doesn't really need or want an LBJ style program. All he wants is to quote the title of your book, burn it down. Just stop depriving me of opportunities that I would naturally have gotten. Just stop demonizing me and stop doing this to me. And even to the maybe they're not credentialed or part of the professional class trying

25:46to be, but being because of H1B programs and a lot, which is why what Trump said, folks about Americans not having talent and we need these 600,000 Chinese nationals, burn them so badly because it's exactly what you just said, Tom. It's like, I really just need you to get out of my way and I'll be able to make living just on my own. And it is this is a great example of why they there's parts of this system that they don't want to reform. They just want to burn it down. This is a great example of that. But even those who aren't credentialed, they feel this immigration is another great example of this. They feel like part of the immigration system is designed to cater to the wealthy and it is. I mean, they feel that way because it's true and it comes at their expense. We always hear people say things like you won't do these jobs, but that's nonsense. Putting aside agriculture, right, or hospitality even, these jobs were even taken from them in trade jobs. I mean, carpentry, HVAC, electrical, roofing, try to be an 18 year old or a 19 year old

26:52kid who wants to try to put himself through college and get a summer roofing job. Good luck with that. There'll be a Guatemalan who will do it for $5, $10 an hour less. You're just not going to get it. And even if you did a lot of these workers look at these younger guys as, no, they're not going to work as hard. So I'm going to go to the 7-11 on the corner and I'm going to pick up 30 workers. Like that happens to them. So yeah, I think what you're saying is absolutely worth recognizing that not everybody needs like a hand up on that part of the ladder. It's not in that ladder politics. If I could dumb it down and one thing, giving somebody a hand up does not equal giving a hand out. There are two totally different things. But even that many of them don't even need it. Tom don't even want it. So the anger is just unbelievably palpable and one you're considering that think about how this administration has behaved over the last year plus because they were supposed to be the ones who understood this. There was supposed to be the ones that were going to address it and they didn't more worse than they did. They seemingly themselves sounded like the left.

27:56You know, like you don't have a right to wine. You don't have a right to complain. And just to tell you, I actually did consider an entire chapter about how certain groups don't understand tribal politics the way that most others do and they've been left behind because of it. But then I decided as I was writing, this could be an entirely different book. I'm going down a rabbit hole everywhere I go. I'm going down a rabbit hole with it because it's true. And by the way, some groups I'm talking about is particularly white men, younger white men. And it's something that they learn from prior generations. They feel like they're not allowed to band together and serve their interests collectively the way that all these other groups in America do. Ethnic, religious, ethno-religious, all of it. They all, it's okay for them to band together and lobby for their interests and push politically for their interests and political pressure that serves an agenda that will make their lives better. The only group that can't seemingly do that is white men.

28:57And if they do, they get called all sorts of names. Even by the side, that's a post-apolitically aligned with them. Leads to a lot of anger, Tom, you know? Well, now that leads me to this question. I want to read a little passage from page 184 and have you elaborate on where you're going. So you say, if you're with us this far, you probably agree with our broad premise that when a society drifts into humiliation, exhaustion, scarcity, elite hypocrisy, and intergenerational foreclosure, the young become highly persuadable. Together, we've witnessed many such examples. And yet examples alone are not a forecast. And then you say that the question that this prompts is, what could all of this look like here in America, in our lifetime, in a society that still flatters itself as uniquely stable, uniquely pragmatic, uniquely inoculated against the passions and pathologues. We assign to more dramatic nations and more primitive times. It's an interesting kind of question because as recently as the 1990s, we had a presidential election between Bill Clinton and Bob Dole.

29:59Like, how does it get more boring and inconsequential than that? I mean, you lose no matter which one of them gets elected. But yet in a way, the fact that that happened in some ways, I know this might shock people that I would put it this way, I think a lot of people tuned out politics in the 1990s because, I mean, the 1990s were basically pretty good time. You know, they didn't have to obsess over politics the way they do now. And so we did have a pretty stable America in the 1980s. I mean, we had the 1960s, but for my lifetime, most of it has been basically stable because the system basically kind of works. And we expect to see a really angry electorate and radical change and demagoguery. We expect to see that in other countries, that happens in other places. But given the state of the electorate right now, as you're describing your book, who knows what the American future could be? It might not be Bob Dole versus Bill Clinton forever. It might not be its morning again in America from the 1980s.

31:03It might be something much, much more unfamiliar to us. So now, it's, thing is, I don't like making predictions of where things are going because I don't like being wrong. You can be wrong when you make predictions. Which you can't be. Trust me. But I have a guest on the show who is willing to step into those waters. Where could this take us? I'm so glad you brought that up because I said before we were an uncharted territory and we didn't really know. And I was kind of alluding to this, which is that in my business, it's generally thought of that the society would be healthier if more people participated in the process. And I agree with that in theory. The problem is in reality, in practice. That's not really the case. When society is stable and things are going well, a lot of people check out like they did in the 1990s and the car is driving itself. It's basically what happens. When we see periods like we've seen recently where there's a very angry, and this, I think

32:04we're going to see something different in the midterms, but it isn't midterms. So it would stay tuned to 28. And let's look at 16. That drove people out that had been voted in 2012. In 2020, in 24, these are not signs. High participation has not been a sign of that healthy and democracy that my business has kind of like lived in a fantasy world hoping for. In fact, it's been indicative of a lot of turmoil and a lot of anger and widening gaps of everything. It's the tabs to have nots, the riches, the pores, the mediocre, the talented, and sometimes that's inverse. My concern again is that we can just look back and try to not over-complicate this. When people are upset, we see wild gyrations and swings in the other direction. Typically, the bigger the let down, the bigger the failure, the bigger the correction or sometimes over-correction. And in response to Obama, who was supposed to come in after Bush, who put together

33:06what at the time in 04, Democrats thought they were doomed forever. He won every single growing, fastest growing excerpt in America. And they thought that they would maybe never recover after George Bush won that election. By 08, it was so bad. He let the country down so badly. And we were in a financial crisis and unpopular war. They gave us Barack Obama. Well, it wasn't long before people realized there was no hope of real change under Barack Obama. And he tried to get us to accept a new normal, Tom, but people they didn't accept it. And there's a reason for that because it wasn't enough. It's not that we had to accept a new normal that was sufficient that people were surviving with. Fred, you don't have to survive, but at least you're surviving. It wasn't that. It was that too many people just weren't even making it. So they turned to Trump. What do we turn to after Donald Trump? I got to tell you, I mean, I will make predictions. I think either it was always, that was always the choice and always the question. I just, I'm sad for my fellow right that they didn't understand this sooner.

34:09Maga had to succeed. They gave us the ball first. These younger generations that everyone's calling socialist now, their inclination was not to give the ball to socialist guys. Their instinct was to give it to the populist right. And Maga had to succeed. Otherwise they're going to try the other radical end of this. And that's, I say mom Donnie, but if this obviously doesn't have to be mom Donnie, she's not where I think she belongs to be. Tom in the prediction markets, but I think we're going to see something much closer to an AOC and maybe that that comes to fruition in incremental stages, but I think probably sooner rather than later. And it's just because in the demographic clock and every year we're going to see two to one new voters replacing older voters. So you know, you say politics could look something very different than what we have seen in the past. The electorate will look very different than anything we have seen in the past. So it's almost natural to expect that our choices are going to look different, especially

35:11in an era where the government doesn't seem to be even functioning at a basic level anymore. And I think it's sad, but I think that's more likely than somehow the adults enter the room again, pull us back from the brink and straighten this all out. I think we're in for a rough patch for a while. And part of that forecast is simply because I don't think people are going to react quick enough. I hope they prove me wrong. I hope they all read, burn it down. They take it seriously and they prove me wrong. But what am I looking at right now when I see the right? Are they rising to this threat? Are they the adults of the room? No, they're trying to backstab JD Vance and prevent him. They're going to bring Marco Rubio back. They want to go not only did they take Trump backward, they want to make the backward regression permanent. They're not taking the threat seriously at all. Hey gang, it's just about time for the infamous Woods Christmas party where you'll enjoy a chef-prepared meal and spend an evening with wonderful folks, including a bunch of Tom Woods show guests. An invitation to the party, which is held about 40 minutes southeast of the Orlando airport,

36:14is a benefit of being a supporting listener of the Tom Woods show. Another benefit is receiving my print newsletter in the mail that contains material I don't send to my email list. And it's your way of taking your stand against the digitalization of everything. And in favor of old-fashioned reading material, you can hold in your hand. You also get complimentary entry into any and all of my murder mystery dinner parties. Lots of benefits. Head over to supportinglisteners.com and I hope to welcome you soon. Thanks for joining us supportinglisteners.com. Before I ask you the final question I have, let me ask you very quickly as a pollster, what's your opinion of prediction markets? Are they useful? I'm not a gambling guy. I dabble with them here and there. Do they tell us something valuable? They do. They tell us where people really think their money is going down. Not all markets are equal because I think what we see with some is just simply people reading the polls and they are making bets based on those polls. The problem now and my real big concern.

37:15As somebody who has been leading the trends all year long, now everyone's hurting to me. I think I see something kind of dark, which is I think pollsters, there's so many of them now. I'm concerned some of my friends are not friends personally, but my polling colleagues are engaged in market manipulation for whomever their clients are to help them make money. And I'm keeping a list speaking of checking it twice. I've been doing it now for months. I kind of teased it on X the other day. I see you. I can see what they're doing. There are large bets being made within sometimes an hour, two hours before a poll drops and those bets aren't justified at all unless you know that poll is coming. And I'm keeping tabs on it. And if that's what it turned out to be after the election will have a reckoning. But I'm concerned that these things are not being, I don't want to say police, but we're not having enough conversations around some of the dangers of these markets.

38:17And I like them and I think they're fun and there can be their need and they do have value. But they also can be exploited very badly and we're just kind of, we're in the wild west period of that right now. It concerns me. Well, the reason I asked that is that there's a really startling result. Now Grancho, I saw it a week ago, maybe it's changed a little. But the question was something like which party is going to win the, like the young person vote, maybe that's 18 to 29. I don't know what the exact range is, but it's a range that the Trump people should be winning given how decisively or at least they did win it before. And it is like 78% that the Republicans are going to lose it. So it doesn't mean they're going to lose it 78 to 22. It means there's a 78% chance they won't win that cohort. And so I want to ask you this maybe the most obvious question in the world. I'm going to ask you anyway, how, how in the world two years in did they blow that demographic? How? This has got to be a record, Tom, for the suicide of a political coalition, especially a very

39:21impressive one. And for a Republican, it's really saying something because Donald Trump put together a much younger, more diverse coalition than anything we've ever seen vote for a Republican candidate in our lifetime. And Reagan, who won by larger margins and obviously larger electoral vote counts right because the country was a lot wider and it was a lot easier to do that. Donald Trump won the most Hispanics by vote share of any Republican since Exoppoles started. And yet all of these young men, whether they're white, black, brown, Asian, doesn't matter. They have blood like a sunken chest wound and Republicans have lost it. How did they do it? They governed for the older generation that did not elect them. That's the answer to the question. I mean, the more general, the Iran war was incredibly foolish. It was incredibly foolish. This is a generation when you look at millennials and down to Zoomers, especially millennials. They had PTSD from this and it's like the forever wars when one of the pledging not to continue

40:26to engage in them and to direct your focus and your attention on the forgotten man and woman in the domestic policy and getting our own ship not from, you know, stop it from listening. That was the core promise of Trumpism and America first and Donald Trump's 10 year public campaign. And he, it's worse than read my lips, no new taxes from George Herbert Walker Bush. It's far worse than that. And there's going to be a penalty for it. I look at Michigan, which is a very, a lot of these Midwest states are very anti-war Midwest states. And Republicans lost control of them during the Vietnam War and Reagan won them. But Republicans had a very difficult time winning them back until Donald Trump came along. And it shouldn't be a surprise to anybody that the anti-war part of Trump's platform was central to how he was able to do that. In Michigan, and just like you said, less than two years ago, he won 18 to 29 year olds. Think about that. Republicans don't win 18 to 29 year olds, let alone in battleground states like Michigan.

41:29Now it's a Trump battleground. It's not even a real battleground to be honest. Now I'm looking at Mike Rogers, who because he was on the ballot with Trump in 2024 also won them. He just didn't win them by as much as Donald Trump won them by he's getting clobbered. He's got like 30% support with them now. And these same people in our poll told us 52%. Yes, I voted for Donald Trump in 24. Now that same 52% is voting 5530 for Al Sayyad. And this is why they didn't focus on their needs. They told them they would. They told them that this would not be more of the same, that they would structurally change this economy, this system or society. So they could have a crack at the American dream, the way that the silent generation did, the way that boomers did. What's the American dream, by the way guys, let's simplify it very easily. Home ownership. Getting a job, being able to get married, have a family, have your own home, that's the American dream. It's not complicated.

42:30And they're promised to be able to reach that, to achieve that is not a strong promise the way it was for prior generations. And that's what my, if I could say anything, stress anything, is to older generations. It's, look, these grievances are real. They are absolutely real. And it's unfair to ask these people to just stick with you when you did nothing for them. I mean, that's just the fact. You started a war, you promised you didn't, you would never start and you made their lives harder. They're going to punish you for it. Now I could bring a Trump partisan on and he can point to legitimate things that Trump did. But the problem is when you take the housing issue and say, oh, this is boring, who really cares about this? The important thing is that the boomers need to keep their house values up because that's how they have, because basically what's happened is the monetary system in the US is so bad. That's right. That to preserve your purchasing power, you have to do it via your house. Yep.

43:30And so we need to keep those prices high for those people. And for you, well, maybe we'll get you a 50 year mortgage or we'll figure something out. But it all has seemed like kind of an afterthought. And going into it, you can find speeches in 2024 where he's saying, I can get those prices down 40% to 100% on 100%. He did not promise 50 year mortgages and to keep home prices elevated. He promised affordability. He said, is this Biden flation? He killed it. Things were going great until they threw me out of office. And if you bring me back, I will return that economy. That was his central promise to people and they expected that. And instead, and they openly welcomed it. They said, we get it. Well, I'm sorry, but we get it. They lied to us about Russia. They lied to us about COVID. They lied to us about everything. We made a mistake. We replaced you with somebody who was supposed to be the adult in the room. Oh, by the way, they lied about him being senile. He was senile. You actually were a really good president. The economy was, you were a very good steward of the economy.

44:31You didn't start any new wars. We're sorry. We want you back. Oh, by the way, we'll elect you by an even bigger margin and give you the popular vote for the first Republican in 20 years as long as you come back and be that guy again. Did he come back and be that guy? No. He told them if you care about issues that I don't want to hear about, I don't want your support anymore. If you can't afford a mortgage, the best I can do for you is make you an indentured servant for 50 years. It's outrageous. So while I understand the Trump partisans reaction, it could have been worse under Harris, you're right. It could have been. But that wasn't the promise you made to these kids. We'll make it marginally worse than marginally better than Biden. That's not what you told them. You told them you would come in to go wrecking ball to this entire system. In fact, Donald Trump said, I will be your retrobution. And he didn't. That's not what he delivered. He delivered more of the same and he sold those kids out. Let's get real.

45:32Be real for a new war. So you can continue to live in a bubble, but I'm telling you the demographic clock is about to run out. And if we don't address these kids, Tom, they're going to run to somebody else and it's not going to be pretty. It's going to be very ugly. We have to write this ship. And we can. That's the good news. It's not all doom and gloom. We can't, but we can't afford to sit here and have these ridiculous debates over while we were out war with Iran for 47 years. So listen to your argument. We've been at war with a country that Donald Trump said he's not going to go to war with. Your logic just doesn't, you know, and not to mention Jack Hunter makes the great point that that makes Ronald Reagan a traitor because he sold weapons to Iran. Apparently a war was going on with them. What a great point. Who said that? Jack Hunter. I want to, okay, because I want to credit, I want to credit Jack Hunter for saying that. That's one I didn't even think of. Yeah, I didn't either. That's incredible. I mean, and by the way, this is what Trump never understood and it's really, really tragic.

46:36His suit of armor, his chainmail, his real protection against being removed. If Democrats take over was always these voters, his support among the public, core constituencies in the public that politicians really think about when they decide whether or not they're going to remove a president Reagan. He had it, which is why when the Neocons almost got him impeached, they didn't, the Democrats didn't move forward with it. They had him with the Iran Contra scandal guys. I mean, I'll he jumped on the sword, but they had him. If they wanted to, they could have moved forward. They didn't because Reagan's support among the public was too strong and they were afraid of retribution the next time an election came so they just let it slide and they moved on. Trump doesn't have that now and he's new. You're going to, I'm sad to see it, but we're going to see it. Republicans are going to look and they're going to say, where is his white working class base? Where's his angry young black men and Hispanic women? I mean, Hispanic men, they're not here anymore. They don't support him anymore. So guess what? Neither do I. That's going to happen.

47:37It's tragic. Well, the book is burn it down. What the polls say young Americans really want. I'll link to it at tomwoods.com slash 2801, but you should take it. There's so much you need to know that is contained within the covers of this book about where things are likely going that I urge people to check it out. So rich, great talking to you as always. Thanks, Emilia. Thanks so much. I hope you enjoy the rest of it. And thank you for having me on and discuss it. It's a real important conversation and all the best. I'll see you soon. All right. Thanks, Emilia. And thank you, ladies and gentlemen. Make yourself and those you love less vulnerable to the regime, both mentally and physically. Get more forbidden information at tomsfreebooks.com and be sure to subscribe to the show wherever you listen. See you next time. Bye. Like the sound of the Tom Woods show, my audio production is provided by Podsworth Media.

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