Episode 38: The 2024 Election

Hello, I'm Adrian Dobb.

And I'm Maura Donegan.

And whether we like it or not, we're in bed with the right.

So, Adrian, today we are talking about

the subtext

under

this lovely, joyful election season, which is that this presidential election seems to have something to do with gender.

Yeah,

this is going to be maybe one of our

more frustrating episodes.

So if you're prone to slamming your head against the wall, or if you just cannot take any more election content, I don't blame you.

Just, you know, rate and review us on iTunes and pretend you listened and download and tell all your friends.

Yeah, yeah.

Rate and review all episodes except except for this one on IT.

But, like, I wanted to talk to you about this, Adrian, because, first of all, you're one of the smartest people I know.

But also, you know, there is a

sort of undercurrent or like running commentary on the role of gender in these elections, in this election in particular, for the presidency that seems not right size to what's happening and also seems asymmetrically reflected in the actual campaigns, right?

One of these campaigns is running a much more gendered, like, sort of sales pitch than another one is.

Right.

And also we're kind of seeing asymmetrical gendered realignment of the electorate in this election that's going much more one way than the other.

So tell me what you're seeing.

I think one of the things that I've noticed is that, you know, everyone's obsessed with polls.

Everyone's wondering about polling average, et cetera, et cetera.

And the big story.

The thing that's got every Democrat in the country currently pissing their pants, of course, is

the seeming racial realignment around certain groups, especially African-Americans and Latinos.

It's very important to note that those realignments are still pretty minuscule, but

these were demographics among which Democrats were running up truly insane margins in the Obama era and well beyond it.

And there is a lot of data in the cross tabs that kind of suggests that that is coming to an end.

But what's funny is that I rarely ever

see the remark done when people

sort of try to draw stuff out of these polls that really it's not a racial realignment, it's a gendered realignment.

That is to say, really what you're seeing is support for first Joe Biden, but then also Kamala Harris has cratered among or has not cratered, but it has definitely climbed among men of color, not among women.

And that is to say, right, if you're trying to to figure out how someone's going to vote, the first question you should ask is not what do they look like or where do they live?

It is, you know, do they identify as male or female?

That seems to be a better guide.

And it's interesting that that doesn't seem to come through in the discussion of the polls and of predictions at all.

Yeah, there's almost been an unwillingness, at least among some sectors of the media and the pundit class, among which I reluctantly count myself, to look at the role that masculinity is playing in the election, right?

And that

to overlook the degree to which this election has become really a referendum on the role of women in American life, particularly post-Dobbs.

And if the pundit class doesn't want to have that conversation, I'll tell you, like Donald Trump does.

There is a real gendered cast.

to Trump's campaigning.

You know, there is his selection of J.D.

Vance, who has made male gendered gendered grievance and contempt, particularly for childless women, but really for a whole swath of liberal coded gendered and social arrangements and family arrangements really central to his political identity over the past few years, right?

That guy is now number two on the Trump ticket and Trump's presumed heir for the leadership.

of the Republican Party, right?

And that guy's gender grievance has become really, really central to the campaign.

You also see the Trump campaign leaning heavily into male grievance among young men voters, right?

They have Trump going on to a series of podcasts where he's giving these really long interviews.

A guy whose time we're supposed to believe is very valuable is spending three hours talking to Joe Rogan.

one hour or two hours talking to these other Manosphere male audience-centric podcasts, right?

Because his pitch is almost exclusively to men under 45, trying to turn them out, trying to make them feel like they can be vindicated by Donald Trump.

Well, and look at the appeal via his other great surrogate, and maybe surrogate son, Elon Musk, right?

We were talking in another episode with friend of the pod, Iron Carman, and she pointed out that the childless cat lady comment really was J.D.

Vance tried to audition for Trump, basically, by melding kind of Trump-style insult comic Bush Belt masculinity with the kind of incel and/or breeding-obsessed kind of Silicon Valley creep masculinity of Elon Musk.

And so that's been in the DNA of this campaign every step along the way.

It is really a pitch based on masculinity and on gendered hierarchies.

And I want to zoom in a little on the state of the like young male vote because the thing about young men, these under 45, and particularly the under 30 male voters that Trump is making this big pitch to in the waning days of the campaign, is that they are kind of traditionally, like a lot of young voters, understood to be an asset to Democrats.

They're also not really understood to be very high propensity voters, right?

They have interests and grievances and desires and anxieties that haven't normally been really well captured for political action, right?

They're maybe more capturable as consumers,

but not so much as like voters, right?

So this is an interesting strategy by Trump.

And I think it reflects both an ideological commitment, but also maybe a sense of his own, a sense of where his strengths are and sort of the truth of his message.

I don't know.

What do you think?

Yeah, I mean, to me, like every other left-leaning person in America, I'm terrified of what's going to happen next week.

The one thing that does, you know, when I'm absolutely hyperventilating, or it gives me a little bit of pause, I'm thinking maybe this won't be quite so bad, is the fact that Trump's strategy really does seem designed to maximize support in a group that infamously doesn't show up to vote.

And he...

seems to be looking to alienate Americans whose propensity to vote is much higher.

I don't know, maybe in 10 days we'll sit here and say, well, gee, you know, it was a risky strategy, but he did it.

But it is interesting, right?

It is

trying to sort of perform a kind of political magic with a group that, as you say, is as much more reliable as consumers as it is as political actors.

And to some extent, obviously, that plays to Trump's strength in this particular kind of retail politics

in that he, well, he doesn't do retail politics in the traditional sense, but what he does do is

try and sell you some steaks.

And, you know,

like basically Musk and Trump sort of are united in the fact that they're both these grifters that really give you a sense, like all good self-help gurus, I think that you too could become a grifter like them and that everyone else is a mark, right?

So I do wonder whether some of this is just going to raise money and bring in cash much more than it brings in votes.

But I guess we'll know more in a few days.

Yeah, there is a way that Trump's own campaign has sort of taken on some of the sleazy,

like snake oil salesman-like qualities of like a Twitch streamer or like a

crypto guru or like a late-night info marshal, even.

Like he's hawking weird shit.

Yeah.

Like commemorative coins

and gold sneakers.

Although, taken on, I feel like it's always had that.

I mean, Lindell and Trump basically peas in a pot.

I mean, the man made his money or made it and became famous for basically auditioning people to work with him while his company was failing.

I mean, in some way, he is, you know, he is the late night infomercial guy or the, you know, or the

car empire that's always teetering on the brink of bankruptcy.

That's that's him.

It's interesting that the aggrieved masculinity vote overlaps so much with the like get rich quick scheme mark vote.

You know, the guys who

maybe

are really certain that Dogecoin is going to take

and that they're not going to have to get a job.

That seems to be sort of the similar demographic, right?

There's a degree of like narcissistic wounded entitlement mixed with, I think, like genuine economic despair.

You know, that might be a tad more humanizing than what I actually mean, but like a sense of lost options, right?

And I think there is something,

you know, I'm very politically suspicious of, you know, pundits making serious inquiries into the fallen state of men.

But there is something that Trump has become a product of, which is a real combination

of the

rise of women's status and their entrance into the workforce and into public life in really large numbers during the Roe era following the advent of the pill and second wave feminism in these last five or six decades and the simultaneous decline in the American industrial economy that

provided a lot of men with not just their jobs, but also their identities and their sense of their life's meaning, right?

So they've lost.

status and they've also lost relative status, right?

They are not doing as well as their fathers were, and they are not as important and domineering vis-a-vis women as their fathers were.

And they are really focusing on that latter half, right?

The anger that these

supposedly dispossessed, downwardly mobile young men have is much more easily

harnessed, I think, for misogyny.

and for a project of domination politics, which is necessarily misogynistic, than it is for like an anti-corporate or anti-elite politics, right?

I'm comparing like Trump's pitch to this cast of young male voters to Bernie Sanders, right?

Bernie Sanders was like, you know, one of the things his movement was doing was trying to create an alternate path for a masculinity that had lost relative status, right?

And they never really successfully, I mean, they never really admitted that that's what they were doing.

And they also never really successfully successfully integrated that masculinity project with their left-wing politics, right?

Because

it has at its core a status grievance.

And a status grievance fits in, I think, much more easily with a right-wing hierarchical enforcement politics, like what Trump is doing.

Some of this, I think you're absolutely right, does reflect real shifts in the American economy, right?

The number of Americans who

basically

hustle to make money in this way has increased and it's not necessarily by choice.

It's partly because

of long-term trends in

US industrial production, union rates, et cetera, et cetera.

At the same time, it's very noticeable, right?

I think the figure is something like three-quarters of influencers in America are women, right?

So it's really this thing.

It is, once again, it is a real economic problem over which a symbolic matrix of gender and status is overlaid, right?

Like where if one group does it, it's okay.

If another group has to do it, it's not, right?

And I do think that that's that's very clearly what's going on here.

We had an event at Clayman recently where, you know, a guest said something really smart, which was to say, masculinity as a status will always need its other, right?

It always needs to be higher than.

That's what makes the status, right?

Like someone, if you have it and get certain benefits through it, someone else must not have it, right?

And this is the kind of change, the kind of symbolic change

that a lot of this politics is responding to, even when there is a real underlying economic problem that, as you say, that Bernie Sanders might feel like he wants to address.

But

there's an additional layer to it, and Trump is working with and appealing to that.

Yeah, and

I think

this might be, I mean, it is

drawn into a little bit starker relief in this cycle, not only because Trump is running against a woman candidate, which he has not done since 2016, but because this is also happening in the wake of Dobbs, right?

Dobbs was not only a blow to American women, I think in some ways it is being

metabolized as a vindication for American men, right?

Like look at this ruling that was the symbol of women's status, right?

Like we do not have the ERA, we do not have formal sex-based equality in our Constitution.

What we had instead was Roe v.

Wade, which bore a ton of symbolic weight

as a stand-in and really like a shorthand for women's legal and formal equality in the U.S.

that has now been stripped away, but

in the years that it was in effect, allowed those women to enter the workforce, allowed our economy and our social world to reorient itself so that it would be thinkable that a man would have a woman boss.

And that

is something that has been taken away as well as the formal abortion right, right?

Is this mechanism by which women gained independence and status relative to men, right?

So when we talk about Roe v.

Wade, being taken away, you know, the sex politics of the anti-abortion movement are very complicated.

The sex politics of Dobbs are very complicated, right?

I don't think conservatives, including Donald Trump, see this as a unmitigated win because abortion, in addition to

granting greater autonomy for women, also granted greater sexual access for men, right?

So there's a way in which pervert masculinities can become pro-abortion.

We've talked about like Dave Portnoy, who's pro-abortion.

Hugh Hefner was famously very pro-abortion, right?

But there is also a symbolic victory for that wounded masculinity in Dobbs' demise.

It goes, yeah, fuck you.

And now we're going to restore the previous gendered order in which we're on top, and we are going to punish you for having disturbed it in the first place in the latter half of the 20th century.

And that is, I think, one of Trump's pitches.

It's certainly something that J.D.

Vance is really trying to sell.

Yeah.

At the same time, I think Vance gets at something else that's interesting, which I mean, you're right, that some of this is about men's status, but it's funny that, of course, so much anxiety attaches who counts as men, right?

So for one thing, there is this kind of real anxiety about trans people that, you know, that brings out really the worst rhetorical excesses in this campaign, in Trump's and Vance's campaign.

But on the other hand, there's also this kind of insistence that men are no longer men, which is kind of weird to do by a party that's currently winning men.

Earlier today, JD Vance tweeted, who do you actually think the gross majority of the men who stormed the beaches of Normandy would vote for?

The answer is obvious, Donald J.

Trump, right?

Like, it's really kind of interesting.

Well, no, it's casting them as a return to that wounded.

Right, exactly.

Right?

Yeah.

It's like voting for Trump is like storming the beaches of Normandy because it is a vindication

and a reclaiming.

of a rightful leadership to which you have, of which you have been denied, right?

That has been stolen from you.

Good friend of mine and friend of the pod, Anika Brochmid, texted me on Twitter a video that Elon Musk apparently shared that is basically that.

And she was like, this is, I think you just made that for embed with a right.

And like, yeah, we might have to do a breakdown of that in frame by.

Slice it in here.

Slice in the audio.

This is what it's for.

This is what the phone is for.

So fun fact about me, Moira, what you may not know is that I don't know how to do that, how to splice it in.

But why don't we just watch it together and react in real time to this video from Elon Musk, who I have blocked, so I didn't see it before.

But yeah, it's one minute and 39 seconds, and it seems to be a wild ride.

This is a

video posted to Elon Musk's Twitter account, or I guess his ex-account.

It has 90,000 retweets and about half a million likes.

We live in hell.

Anyway,

so on, let's let's start it on three,

two, one,

go.

Wow.

Someone's singing.

Statue of Liberty.

Okay.

Fighter Jets.

Mel Gibson.

Mel Gibson in The Patriot.

Casper David Friedrich.

Stock market.

Elon.

Yeah, oh, then Elon Musk.

Really like the charismatic.

Rocket ship.

Rocket ship.

So many.

Western civilization.

Yeah.

There's like a very intense song, like a power ballad, but it's not anything.

More rocket ships.

Hulk Hogan,

Donald Trump as a gladiator.

No, that's him as Achilles in Troy.

Then, oh, Warhammer 40k.

Hey, this is something for okay.

Um, this really is all shit.

Oh, a guy on a treadmill running very fast.

Him as Alexander the Great, a helicopter.

God, the images are just flashing so fast.

I know, I'm like stroking out AI as a wrestler, Trump from Real, Trump from one of the Rocky movies,

he's boxing.

Now it's a cartoon.

More Mel Gibson and a Lion.

Lion or Aslan or something like that.

Who knows?

Trump.

Voiceover of Trump saying he's going to spill blood.

Mel Gibson again.

More Mel Gibson.

More lions.

Literal Predator.

And then the Watchman guy, the one with the hanging dong.

Bald Eagle.

Bald Eagle at the end making weird eye contact.

More lions.

Trump at WWE.

Fighter Trump.

Is that a challenger explosion?

What the fuck did I just watch?

I am not well.

It is kind of like a.

I don't want to be insensitive here, but it reminded me of those videos that they like music videos they used to play where they would have like the epilepsy warning.

I mean,

I definitely think people should not be watching this if they are, if they're given to seizures.

Yeah, it's a lot of flashing different images of various mask aspiration, right?

So there's a lot of war imagery, but mostly like war machinery.

So there was like some machine guns, there were a lot of planes, there were a lot of rockets.

I take it Elon Musk's rocket.

Howitzer, I think, in there somewhere.

There were a lot of birds of prey.

There was a lot of ancient Roman pastiche, and Trump's face sort of like pasted onto scenes of like it's all Greek.

It's from the movie Troy and from the movie Alexander the Great, Oliver Stone's not masterpiece starring Colin Farrell.

Yes,

they mounted noted 79-year-old McDonald's enthusiast Donald Trump onto Colin Farrell's body.

I mean, these people

are 13.

I'm sorry.

What is going on?

And then

there was a lot of running, like Mel Gibson and the Patriot running in various directions, various Trump like avatars running in various directions.

And then I think the quintessential shot was the guy on the treadmill, a white guy on a treadmill with like spray tan and bleached blonde hair, wearing sunglasses.

He's inside and he's got a Trump flag and he's running incredibly fast.

And I think that's the perfect metaphor because he's like

really self-important and he's working really hard and he's going absolutely nowhere.

Nowhere, yeah.

Yeah, it was uh it's it was very childlike.

It felt like it had no content, right?

Probably the creepiest part was the voiceover of Donald Trump promising actual violence, right?

Talking about the death penalty, talking about killing people, talking about shedding blood, and then which was, you know, spliced over with shots of actual Donald Trump and then also

like predator ends, like AI lions attacking other lions.

But, you know, I think your Fred was right.

I think this is like a kind of,

you know, it's clearly a vibes-based

promise, right?

It's not really

a coherent

masculinity, except in its promise of domination and power, right?

And in the fact that like no one there can

credibly embody that masculinity, nor does everyone probably, like between Trump, whoever, whatever 13-year-old made that video, and Musk, who shared it, they don't even probably mean the same thing, but you're right.

They can find each other in the sort of lingua franca of like...

domination, right?

That's the one thing they all respond to.

Keyboard smash of signifiers, but they do have they do have this one underlying commonality.

Yeah,

it's if Jean-Rodrillard married an axe body spray, basically.

It's just pure simulacra of dude sweat.

Yeah.

Yeah, I did feel like I could smell it.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's dark, man.

But so that's, but you're right.

I mean, but at the same time, it does suggest not something to be proud of, but something to be regained, right?

And I do think that that's kind of interesting because it does, for instance, it's different from the gendered pitch that Hillary Clinton made in 2016, right?

Which was not about

what women can be, but what women already have accomplished, right?

So I mean, the part of that is, you know, the reactionary versus the progressive, that in some way the reactionary does have to have to spell out that like you guys should be proud of this status you have, but also you're shit at it because like you're no longer living in the past.

No, but well, it was stolen from you.

right it's i think i think the where i would disagree with you is you understand the indictment of like modern manhood or liberal manhood that is being made by somebody like vance to be an indictment of the audience.

Right.

And I don't think that's true.

I don't think he's saying you failed.

I think he's saying you've been failed.

Like this has been taken from you.

Now take it back.

Well, I mean, I think I was just making the point that it feels strange to make that your pitch to someone, right?

But then again, I guess this is what they've been saying about America all along.

They claim to love it.

And then every single indication of it and most people in it, they can't stand.

Well, it feels feels like you don't really love this country that much.

Right.

Like the stratification of the real men from the fake soy boys is mirrored in their stratification of the real Americans versus the enemies within, right?

People who can be excluded from that in group.

But, you know, like, it's interesting you talk about Hillary Clinton and her pitch about what women are,

because I wanted to turn in the time we have left to Kamala.

Yeah.

who is also experiencing a gendered realignment on her support, but who is making a very, very different pitch in terms of her own gendered performance for this office.

Yeah.

Like, I think Kamala Harris would prefer if everybody forgot that if elected, she would be the first woman president.

Yeah.

She's made it

like a pretty conscious effort to like de-sex herself in as much a way as she can without being like cons.

conspicuously gender non-conforming, you know, like

I don't think she'll ever, you'll ever see her in a skirt.

Yeah, but also not a tux.

Yes, or like, there's no uh non-constructed blazer in her future, you know.

Um,

uh, but there is a total absence of the gendered pitch for her candidacy, which I thought was very present in Hillary Clinton's 2016.

You know, I'm with her, uh, all those The Future is Female t-shirts that everybody was wearing that year, you know,

this optimistic feminism, completely absent.

What you have instead is a really conspicuously not angry, but mournful post-Dobbs abortion message.

Yeah.

And what do you think about how she's positioning that?

So you and I talked about this briefly yesterday.

And

my read on it is that it's post-Dobbs in two ways.

One is that

you can't tell a story of straightforward progress anymore.

The Supreme Court has seen to it that that is not going to be the story no matter what.

And then the second thing that makes it post-Dobbs is that to some extent you don't have to do the the 2016 you know go women stuff because the gendered realignment predates right uh kamala harris's entrance into the race like this is this is there there will be many people hoping next tuesday when they are in the booth that they are

voting for the first female president.

You don't have to say that anymore.

After Dobbs, it seems like, or at least that's her calculus, I think, that in some way this will be understood.

The people who will be moved by that message will be, or will already have been moved, and that there's nothing to be gained from putting a bow on it at this point.

That's how I read this as opposed to Dobbs kind of candidacy.

In some way, this was different for Biden, who had to prove that he got it, right?

Like,

there is a visceral understanding that she gets it.

And I think that her answers on the abortion issue and on Dobbs in the debate or made that forcefully clear.

And at the same time, I do think that there is a

that it in a paradoxical way means that she doesn't gain very much by then front-loading gender any further.

Does that make sense?

That's sort of my read on it.

I think you're right.

I think there's a degree, and you know, you'll hear a lot of off the record quotes from people who work for her saying something to this effect.

It's like, everybody knows she's a woman, they can see her, you know,

and the notion that leaning into an affirmative feminist politics

is not necessary.

I would say that I also think that they are treating it as if it would be a liability, right?

It would seem that one of the lessons taken from Hillary Clinton's 2016 defeat,

and I think from the rise of anti-feminism as a much more potent political force in the years since, is that feminism is in some ways,

at least among some very visible and powerful sections of the electorate, incredibly unpopular.

Yeah.

And you also see this a bit in the asymmetrical media coverage of the gendered realignment, right?

Because you talked about how we see a lot of media stories about quote-unquote people of color, quote-unquote black and Latinos, going to Trump when actually it's just black and Latino men, right?

You see also a ton of stories about Trump's advantage with men that often obscure the reality that Trump is winning men, according to the polls, by less than what Harris is winning women by.

Women have gone to the Democrats disproportionately more when you compare to how Republicans are gaining men, right?

Women are voting for the Democrats in it by a much, much bigger margin, right?

And they're moving, particularly like white women are moving to the Democrats, and especially women uh who are older like over 45 over 50 those very reliable senior citizen voters uh particularly the women are really really moving to the left to the democrats and that had been a fairly reliable republican constituency yeah yeah i mean hence the hence the what what i mean the probably the biggest sort of

2016 moment that that Harris has indulged in in the last couple of weeks is the Liz Cheney thing, right?

I mean, like, basically,

that is the pitch, right?

To say, hey, formerly Republican women, how about it?

Right.

Like, maybe you could, maybe, maybe kind of feels like you're alienated from the party you've been voting for.

This is the party that still has a home for you, where not just anti-feminism, I mean, you're right about anti-feminism, but also where just woman hating has become kind of the coin of the realm.

Very specifically, Dobbs, right?

Dobbs is understood correctly as Donald Trump's doing.

Yeah.

And women who will never need an abortion or will never need an abortion ever again understand

Roe to have implicated their status, right?

There was one, I think it was maybe Nebraska, a Nebraska Republican Senate candidate was like, why are all these old women asking me about abortion?

You're postmenopausal.

You're never going to need an abortion again.

Wow.

Which was so gross.

But it also misunderstands the issue, right?

Because Roe is not just about the material access to an abortion, although that is life-changing for the people who are denied it.

It is also about women's equal status and women's dignity, right?

And in that, all women are implicated, even the ones who are very, very aware that they are not going to be needing to get an abortion in their red state anytime soon.

So the symbolic weight of Dobbs, I think, is really heavy, even without these constant parade of tragic stories of married middle-class white women with wanted pregnancies who've had horrific health complications and suffered in unspeakable needless ways as a result which the harris campaign is is relying on very heavily in their swing state messaging yeah i think it has an even bigger resonance right and that's another comparison you're not really seeing being made

between the status deprived young male voters who Trump is trying to appeal to and women, right?

Because the male voters have had a decline in status that is decades in the making.

The women voters had a decline in status that was dramatic, heavily symbolic, and very swift.

And it was quite recently.

So there's all this hand-wringing over men's material conditions and men's social positioning that is being given a lot of moral and political attention in a way that suggests it's more significant than what happened to women.

Yeah.

Yeah, I think this is so fascinating.

What you're describing, of course, is far truer of the people sort of who are supposed to be these neutral and objective analysts of this election than it is really of the MAGA movement, right?

This is really what the New York Times seems to think.

It seems to think that some people's loss of status somehow matters more, somehow is more salient to an analysis of this election than others.

I was just looking this morning at the Tilt, which is Nate Cohn's newsletter over at the New York Times, and it's about the exact problem that Harris seems to be doing well among high-propensity voters, and Trump seems to do better or the more low-propensity the voter gets, basically, right?

And as far as I can tell, Cohn gets through that entire newsletter, which is long and has quite a bit of interesting data, without using the word gender or women once, right?

Like it's, it, it really does seem to suggest, hey, this is about, about whose opinions really shape elections and whose don't.

And it's fairly clear who's,

according to these pundits at least, kind of don't, right?

Yeah, I mean, I think there's a couple of things you're touching on here, Adrian.

One is the

allergy among a certain class of intellectual and pundit to treating gender as a serious social hierarchy and a serious political force, right?

That is something that people have been very resistant to, or at least at least interpreting women's gender as a serious social force and women as meaningful, you know, and full citizens and political subjects, right?

It's something that sort of seems to escape the consciousness of this particular type of nerd that there are girls who have full mental lives and interiority just like them,

and that their experience of these phenomena are shaping

their decision making and their perception of the world, right?

And then the other

thing that you're touching on, which I think is, you know, a force that has been

in the ether, like socially,

you know, pertinent, but not entirely like methodologically disclosed, which is that the polls and the punditry purport to reflect the race, right?

They purport to be depicting the state of reality back to us, but they are also shaping that reality.

They are shaping the race, right?

People are seeing polls and they are making interpretations of those polls with the aid of this pundit class, this media

system.

And that is shaping their behavior in turn, right?

So it's a two-way street.

Polls are both reflecting reality and they're informing it and creating it at the same time.

And we don't quite know how that works still, or at least I don't.

Yeah.

And I mean, it's going to matter even more depending on, well, I mean, no matter what happens next week, right?

How a victory or a defeat for whichever candidate is interpreted will be informed by the kinds of polling we see now, right?

And the kind of narratives that either sort of float in the ether or are sort of allowed to really be part of the story.

And the, you know, the idea that, you know, whether it's a Harris victory or a Trump victory, that women and their voting behavior has been a major part of that.

one way or the other, like will likely be written out of it because they appear not to be collecting that data very carefully, or they tend to think, they seem to think it doesn't really matter very much.

And so, that to me is even independent of what happens next Tuesday, it does seem there's a deeper systematic kind of bias at work here that will persist, right?

Like, we, this is the same way that in 2016, it was, you know, it was the white working class that everyone sort of fixated on, even though that was most likely not in the end what pushed MAGA over the edge in those three swing states.

Who gets to be the one who either spoils a Harris presidency or who makes it happen or who turns out or doesn't turn out, right?

Like,

you're absolutely right that it shapes the perception of the race before it happens, but it also is going to shape its interpretation.

Like, whatever the result, we can tell, we can say that it's going to be one of the most momentous elections of our lifetime so far.

You know, its interpretation and its political ramifications will be felt for years.

And there, these kinds of lacunae strike me as, you know, deeply, deeply dangerous and problematic.

Yeah, there is a bias about

whose desires, whose status, and whose suffering is more important.

And that is going to shape both how this race...

is interpreted before and then also after Tuesday's election day.

Yeah.

You know, if there's one thing I know for sure, Adrian, as a pundit, it is that first, every election is the most important election of our lifetimes.

And second, that no matter what happens, it will always confirm my prior.

That's right.

And that's how I sleep at night.

Well done.

Well done.

It's the worst election so far.

Hey, on the plus side, if he wins, we might never have an election again.

So that's a

silver lining.

Yeah, every four years we'll do a special purge podcast to

tell our listeners which areas to avoid during the

fourth annual purge.

That might be a good place to end it.

Godspeed to all our listeners in these last few days before Tuesday.

We're thinking of you.

Hope you're praying for us.

And we'll see you on the other side.

See you on the other side.

The Med with the Right would like to thank the Michelle R.

Clayman Institute for Gender Research for generous support.

Jennifer Portillo for setting up our studio.

Our theme music is by Katie Lyle.

Our producer is Megan Calfis.