Should We Care about Polling Data? Trump vs. Harris on Economic Policies, and Predictions for the Debate

Welcome to Raging Moderates.

I'm Scott Galloway.

And I'm Jessica Tarloff.

Jessica, we're raging moderates with emphasis on the term raging.

Raging all the time, yes.

I mean, I don't know if other people will think we're raging moderates, but we're here to tell you why we are raging moderates.

What does the term moderate mean to you?

Moderate just means anything that's around the center.

That's what it is.

Around the center of an issue.

A lot of people like to identify themselves as politically moderate.

So that's kind of like the center left or the center right of each party.

But I think that it really comes down to how you're feeling about a particular issue at a particular time and that that's what it means to be moderate.

Yeah.

I like to think it means we're not part of a cult, but occasionally we can acknowledge the other side.

Yeah.

And what are your objectives?

If this was a win,

if this podcast gets huge traction, what are you hoping to accomplish here?

I'm hoping to have a lot of really thoughtful conversations about where society actually is, and that maybe folks who are running for office or in elected office will take note of the fact that the biggest voices, the biggest coalition is actually around the center of these issues, and that they'll start acting accordingly.

And also to draw those lines between what's going on in the political sphere and what's going on in the real world, because it's all intertwined.

And I mean, that's really, you know, what you do so well is talk about what's happening in the business and in the markets markets and how it's all part of one big conversation.

I like that.

I mostly just want power.

I'm hoping that we aggregate so much influence up and down Ballot.

That we basically become the ultimate king and queen makers.

And that tomorrow belongs to us, Jessica.

Okay, let's

bust right into it.

In today's episode of Raging Moderates, we'll be breaking down the latest polling, our thoughts on the proposed economic policies, and what to expect from the 90-minute debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump.

So with that, Jessica, we've officially entered the election season and have a lot coming up between now and November 5th.

Can you walk us through how you're thinking about the latest polling, which essentially shows Harris and Trump are neck and neck?

Yeah, so there's, I mean, the first component of all of this is that I'm fundamentally depressed that this is a neck and neck race.

I feel like every time Donald Trump's on the ballot, you just think, how is it possible that this could be close?

And yet it is, which is reflective of the general theme of why we're here to talk about the moderate middle and where the election is actually going to be won.

But it was a big polling weekend because the New York Times Sienna poll came out.

Everyone always goes bananas over it.

It's actually, so it's an A-plus.

quality poll and it's been the most friendly to Trump consistently.

When we started seeing these results that he was winning, you know, upper teens of black support, that he was doing well with Gen Z voters, that Biden and now Harris were softer with female voters.

That was all coming out of the New York Times Sienna poll.

So it's obviously something that makes you sit up and listen.

And this was the same.

It was just like the July poll, similar margins, same soft spots for Kamala Harris.

And you could see, if you went on any social media over the weekend, you could see all of the Democrats absolutely losing their mind.

The bedwedding has commenced again, which is the end of Brat's summer, I guess, that we're all a little less coconut-pilled, but a little bit more realistic about the challenge in front of us.

Do you think I've heard a lot of fears that polling doesn't constantly underestimate Trump because there's a lot of closeted Trump voters?

Do you think that that still holds or that people are no longer embarrassed about endorsing Trump and they're no longer closeted?

I mean, he's lost a lot of elections, which I feel like people don't talk about enough.

Like, he won the big one.

He won in 2016.

But since then, he's been a big drag

down ballot tickets, obviously on his own ticket, losing in 2020.

And so I'm not willing to say yet that the 3% to 5% of Trump voters that were closeted, which is what it was in 2016, that it could be that enormous.

I think there still are some what we consider kind of normal.

people or people that we run into more who aren't die-hard Trumpers that are persuaded by a tax cut, for instance, or might think he would be better for Israel.

And I want to talk about that.

There was a poll of Jewish voters that I found fascinating.

But in general, I feel like people are pretty much out there at this point.

And this election for Trump, win or lose, is kind of,

it should be his last hurrah, right?

He should not be running on the top of the ticket.

If he loses again, he'll be 82 years old at that point.

Or last thud, right?

Or last thud.

Well, that's the hope.

I mean, he'll still try to play Kingmaker with other races, but this is the crescendo moment of the Trump era.

And I think that people are out there for it.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: It strikes me as it's almost sort of comical that we do these national polls because, quite frankly, they're meaningless.

It really doesn't matter what these, I mean, I guess they reflect momentum, but all we really care about is the choice, the polls in, what, five or six states.

And in those states, as far as I can tell, the majority of them, she is up.

And in some, she's up by two, three points.

I mean, if you look at the national polls, okay, it's neck and neck.

I wonder how much of this is the media wants to jones up a closer race and make it seem more heated and tighter than it is.

And I do think it's tighter than I would have thought.

But that when you look at the swing states or what you look at what is actually going to decide this election, we should not report national polls.

It just doesn't make any sense.

What does the picture look like across the swing states?

Well, first to the national poll, in defense of national polls, they're just a snapshot in time.

And I think that it is important to be, to continually gauge yourself as you're going along and to look at those trend lines.

That's why forecasts are so interesting, right?

To see like where Biden was, then what Harris has been able to do, how Trump is moving around.

And he is doing better than a lot of people expected.

And he's coalescing the base in a way that we hadn't expected necessarily, considering the primaries and all of the Nikki Haley support that we were seeing.

So I think it is important and also to draw the contrast.

So we already talked a little bit at the New York Times poll, but there was an ABC Washington Post poll, which is also an A-plus pollster, and they had Kamala Harris ahead by six with likely voters.

That contrast also important, registered voters versus likely voters.

You know, it's very different, like to have an opinion versus I have an opinion and I'm actually going to go and vote.

But you're totally right about the battleground states.

It's all basically within the margin of error.

And something that came out.

in the last week or two that I think is really fascinating is basically Trump is zeroing in on one strategy.

If you look at where he's spending money on advertising, he's got one route that he's heading towards.

And Kamala Harris is still spreading it out.

She needs the blue wall, but she's interested in the Sun Belt.

They really think North Carolina is in play for them.

So it's, it's been fun to watch them kind of go in their different directions, see how they're trying to achieve a win in those places.

But yeah, rays are thin.

And it could be even thinner than 2020, which we know took, you know, days to properly call and then months of litigation, though I won't call it proper litigation, whatever Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis were doing certainly wasn't proper, but it went on for a long time.

And on the issues, so Harris is pulling much better on issues around bodily autonomy.

That's not a shock, 54 to 39.

On quote unquote democracy, although that's a loaded term, it's 50-45.

five for Harris.

On the economy, Trump is resoundingly beating Harris 55 to 42.

And on immigration, he's also resoundingly beating her 53 to 43.

I understand the family planning.

This is more a reflection of how you feel about being pro-choice or pro-life.

The democracy one, it feels like a rabbit hole we could go down.

Talk about whether or not you think that what do you think is going on?

Why do Americans trust more Trump on the economy and on immigration?

And what do you think both candidates need to do to try and either solidify or chip away at that lead that Trump has?

Yeah, so I was

strange to me me to see this result on the economy from the New York Times because the Fox voter analysis and the Fox poll had him between six and eight points ahead on the economy, which means that he, Kamala's basically halved the lead that he had when he was running against Joe Biden, which is awesome to see.

And one thing that's showing up in survey after survey is that people, and this could be a bad thing, they don't feel that they know Kamala as well.

So there's a lot more room for her to grow.

Trump is basically at his ceiling.

No one says like, I don't know know where Donald Trump stands on the issues.

Now, they may not really understand that what would happen if we had all of these tariffs and that it's a tax on the consumer or however his deportation force is going to work.

But she does have room to grow there.

But I think that people still fundamentally see him as a businessman, whether he went bankrupt six times or not.

And they remember a time pre-COVID where they felt they had more money in their pocket and grocery prices were down.

And it's not sexy to create a bumper sticker that said, you know, best recovery in the G7.

You know, like, it still sucks when you go to the store and your items are more expensive.

And she's been working really hard to address that.

Like, I love that she actually calls out the prices of things in speeches and says, I know that your bread is 50%

more than it used to be.

But he's, you know,

people are holding on to a bit of nostalgia about the Trump era in that specific way.

We'll be right back.

Well, the economy was strong during his era.

And the interesting thing, there's kind of a weird dynamic in the sense that when the price of diapers goes up, you blame the administration.

When your salary goes up, you credit your own character and grit.

The fact that actually now wages are increasing faster than inflation, which is a good thing, the administration gets no credit for it because that's because I'm awesome.

Whereas, when gas prices or something else go up, by the way, I think it's just hilarious that anyone assumes the president has any control over gas prices.

But anyway, they blame the administration for prices going up, and again,

they see their raise as well-deserved.

I agree with you.

The thing I would hammer on, and I'm curious to get your thoughts.

I taught economics, I taught graduate

micro and macroeconomics.

And one of the few things that all economists kind of agree on is that tariffs are basically a tax on the consumer.

And his current line of thinking, and I don't think the Democrats have done a very good job of exploiting this, and it's weird to be lecturing Republicans on this issue because they're usually very much anti-tariff.

His narrative is, look, these people have taken advantage of us.

And to his credit, I do think he accurately highlighted the asymmetry in terms of a trade relationship between the U.S.

and China during his administration.

I think he was right on that.

But he's saying all these firms, all these countries are taking advantage of us.

We're going to put, in some instances, a 100% tariff on their products.

And what will happen, according to Donald Trump, it'll make our products more competitive.

Theirs less competitive because theirs will be more expensive, meaning more jobs will return to the U.S.

because we'll be more competitive relative to these foreign imports, which are now much more expensive.

What he leaves out is this key thing that happens every time.

And that is if we slap 100% tariff on Toyotas, they turn around and go, okay, girlfriend, we're putting 100% tariff on Escalades and Jeeps, which makes our products much less appealing to consumers in China and Japan and South Korea, which reduces demand for them, which reduces employment.

But what happens across all markets is the cost of cars for consumers skyrockets.

And there are some instances where tariffs work.

If you're China and you think, I'm going to, it's costing me 200 bucks a ton to produce steel.

I'm going to sell it for 100, put all the domestic suppliers and manufacturers in the U.S.

of steel out of business so I can consolidate the market.

Okay, then you impose a tariff until there's some sort of symmetry around trade.

I get it.

If we're outsourcing jobs because they have forced labor, and it doesn't reflect the costs of doing business in the correct way, fine, a tariff.

But these unilateral tariffs and this hallucination that all of a sudden it will bring bring jobs back to the U.S.

is so wrong, and any economist worth their salt would recognize that.

It strikes me that the Democrats haven't done a very good job so far, and I'm hoping to see that in the debate.

Is it that she does a better job of saying tariffs or taxes, be clear, and this is a terrible idea and hugely inflationary?

What are your thoughts?

Totally agree.

I hope that they're going to keep hammering.

They have a new line that Donald Trump's going to cost you $3,900.

So they've calculated out the cost of these tariffs on the lives of an average American.

And we were talking about tariffs last week on the five.

And my colleague, Jesse Waters, said to me, Well, why did Biden and Harris extend the Trump tariffs on China?

And I actually

I rarely admit that I'm wrong.

Well, Jesse admits that he's wrong way less than I do, but I did not think that they had extended them.

And then when I went and read about it more, so there was all of the usual stuff about how tough the tariffs had been, especially for the U.S.

farming community.

But there was an argument that was being made, and it was all over Bloomberg, that it was still more effective to punish China, even though there was some hurt to the American economy, to send a message about it.

And I think that there is an angle which Kamala could take or Democrats could take more regularly about this if Republicans are going to fall in line on the tariff front to say, we're not talking about tariffs.

We're talking about sanctions.

And sanctions are something that you can use really, really effectively versus just hammering this tariff line, which frankly everybody knows is not going to, as you said, have the outcome that he thinks and is not a rationale for an entire set of economic policies.

You know, he did a speech at the New York Economic Club last week, and he's rambling on about child care.

Look, child care is child care.

It couldn't, you know, there's something you have to have it.

In this country, you have to have it.

But when you talk about those numbers compared to the kind of numbers that I'm talking about, by taxing foreign nations at levels that they're not used to, but they'll get used to it very quickly.

And it's not going to stop them from doing business with us, but they'll have a very substantial tax when they send product into our country.

Those numbers are so much bigger than any numbers that we're talking about, including child care, that it's going to take care.

We're going to have, I look at...

One of the more incoherent things that I've ever heard, and everybody else as well, people are struggling to understand what does this actually mean.

He just keeps saying, I'll pay with tariffs, I'll pay with tariffs.

And what I think that he's doing is he's just trying to say, for bad countries, I'm going to find ways to sanction them in some way.

But he's using the term tariff instead.

It's kind of like, I don't know if you've been following the Hannibal Lecter thread.

You know how he talks about Hannibal Lecter all the time.

And it seems like he doesn't understand the difference between political asylum and actually being in a mental asylum.

So I think that these things

are actually with Trump like

always like the most base thing that they could possibly be.

And I hope that she flips the script on it and talks about how effective they have been in using economic sanctions versus penalizing the American public with tariffs.

So let's talk a little bit about child care because I'm not sure

people really understand

what are the policies on.

So basically, Trump is saying, I'll find a way to create additional revenue such that we have better childcare because child care is child care, according to Trump.

And he was trying to give the notion that I think it's important, I'm in favor of it, and I'm going to raise the money for it we need by taxing these, you know, these nations with their, their asymmetric unfair trade relationship.

What is, can you outline, because I don't know the answer, what is sort of Harris's plan around childcare?

Yeah, well, the most important part of it is obviously the paid family leave as the baseline for everything, bringing back the child tax credit, which cut poverty in America by 50%.

It's astounding that that happened in a couple of years and something that people are really hankering to break.

Poverty across children.

Across children.

Yeah.

Child poverty.

Yes.

And then there's the stuff like that comes in with walls as well with the school lunches.

We have universal 3K and pre-K.

I'm treating this as a bigger bubble of just raising children than just the child care front.

But they also want to have universal daycare, which is something that J.D.

Vance, of course, has railed against in some unearthed clip from 2021.

It's kind of amazing that he won his race for Senate.

There have been a lot of people that have been picking on Tim Ryan.

Like, why were you not going after him with all of these horrendous things that he'd said?

Tim Ryan's team has defended him and said a lot of these clips are coming from us.

You know, we knew about this, but he seems so utterly repellent.

So universal daycare is a big part of it.

And what I appreciate about Democrats and what Kamala is doing is she's not afraid to say that we're going to raise taxes on some people who can afford to pay more taxes.

She's not looking for tariffs as the solution to it.

She's like, this is good old fashioned.

If you're a billionaire, if you're a multimillionaire and not just like two, three, four, five million, we're talking about people over 100 million, 200 million, your taxes are going to go up a bit.

And I'm curious what you think about the unrealized gains proposal, because that seems like a very, very bad idea that even Mark Cuban and Rokana are saying, like, halt the brakes on that one.

But it's obviously part of her plan to pay for all of this.

Yeah, it's funny.

I thought, I was going to bring it up because I thought it might be one.

I mean, so far we're in violent agreement on everything.

I thought it might be one place we disagree.

I think it's, I think it essentially, whether you think, agree with it philosophically, it doesn't matter because they don't work.

When France instituted its wealth tax, the wealthiest man in the world or the wealthiest man in Europe, Bernard Arnaud, what do you know, moves to Belgium?

Really wealthy people are incredibly, among the advantages they register, one of them is they're incredibly mobile.

And what you have here, just I don't know if you've heard about what's going on in the UK, but they're basically doing away with this non-DOM tax.

status where if you have residency in Hong Kong and you live in Britain, you basically can pay Hong Kong taxes, which is zero.

And now they're saying, sorry, after, I think after you're here four years, you got to pay UK taxes.

I actually think philosophically that makes sense.

If you send your kids to school here and you enjoy the culture and the roads and the infrastructure and police and fire of the UK, you should pay taxes.

But what's happened is that it looks like about 10,000 high-net worth UK

residents are leaving and that the purser or the treasury is actually going to end up worse off

than before the non-DOM because these individuals have so much money and we're bringing so much economic growth to the UK that quite frankly, tax advantage that's even unfair was probably the best thing to do for the economy.

The other thing is, I just, my mind goes into a tailspin trying to imagine, okay, if you're going to assess someone's wealth over $100 million every year and then tax their unrealized gain,

who is in charge of putting that number on it?

You can do it when they're publicly traded stocks, but how do you assess the value of real estate, of private partnerships?

How do you assess the value of things?

And does that mean certain asset classes which are less easily assessed become more in vogue and people start selling their stocks and buying real estate or private company assets?

Who's in charge of coming up with that number?

The way I would approach it is an AMT, an alternative minimum tax.

It says, okay,

if you're worth $170 million,

congratulations, you have an AMT, and that is any income you have, you have to pay a minimum 20% on, regardless of the tricks of the trade.

And the other thing I would like to see is an intra intra-country and intra-state agreement where if you're Jeff Bezos and you've aggregated $120 billion in wealth in Washington and you've taken advantage of the school system there, the University of Washington, the Seattle, Tacoma Airport, the culture, and then you peace out to Florida to quote unquote spend more time with your dad,

that when you realize those gains, whatever percentage of those gains were accreted in Washington state, you have to pay Washington state taxes on.

I think you could do the same thing internationally when people move.

But the idea of taxing unrealized gains, I just think it's going to create more problems than it solves.

What are your thoughts?

Well, they're not as elaborate as yours, which is good.

I net net agree with all of that.

And it's been interesting to see people like as liberal as Congressman Rochana, who's in the Bernie wing of the party, and then someone like a Mark Cuban or someone like you advocate for basically the same thing.

And the part that I would add to it that I think really matters with the kind of economic policies that she's putting forward, so she basically has like a founder agenda.

If you go to her website, we should note to everyone, her policy page is now completely decked out.

And you should go and take a look at it.

And what they did that was really smart is for each section, it then has an a project 2025 tab.

So you could see what the Trump agenda would do in contrast to what Kamala is trying to do.

But she really wants to encourage startups and entrepreneurs.

And America has always been the best place to go and start a business to bring your innovative idea out there and to make a shit ton of money.

And it kind of flies in contrast to that idea that we want to give you the $50,000 deduction, right, to get your small business going, which is something economists on the right and the left think is such a good idea.

But oh, if you get to 100 million, then you're screwed.

That it doesn't really add up.

And that's what Ro Khana was talking about.

He gave an interview and he's actually a surrogate for the campaign.

And he just said flat out, like, how are you going to tell people because you got this successful

that we're going to start taxing what is 28%

of your unrealized gains, which is a massive number.

You know, I feel like if it was like 2% or 3%, people would be like, oh, okay, it's kind of like a normal liberal tax.

So I think it's not great for her startup world.

Yeah, I'm, I'm a,

I feel I, and I say this as a small business person, I feel that small businesses are, they're like puppies.

Everybody loves small businesses.

It's hard to, no one ever says, oh, small businesses are taking advantage of our economy and are treated unfairly.

And we romanticize small business, and as a result, and I benefited hugely from this, I believe the tax code probably errs on the side of being too favorable towards small business.

One, it is very easy to shove through a crazy amount of expenses through your small business.

And because of an underfunded IRS, you cannot write off your life, but pretty close to it when you have a small business.

The tax advantages are enormous.

There's something called 1202, which I took advantage of, where if you start a business and it's a C-core and you hold on to the stock in that company for more than five years, if you sell it, the first 10 million or 10 times your initial investment is tax-free.

I didn't even not know that existed, and I've used it twice with companies I've sold.

To me, that kind of makes no sense.

And their viewpoint will be, well, Scott, people like you wouldn't start businesses unless we have these tax advantages.

I don't know any entrepreneur that knew their tax status when they started a company.

That's not why we start companies.

In my view, and I hate to say this because I like the idea of more small businesses, but the reality is there were more small business permits issued last year than I think ever.

And it doesn't seem to be getting in the way of small businesses.

And I feel like it's very populist.

And I would like someone to get more serious about the deficit.

Like, what is this going to cost us?

And I think the best way to help small business would actually be more antitrust that breaks up these big monopolies.

But I'm not sure.

Like, for example, I think the first thing you see, the first result of this, or the second result, more businesses start, $50,000 real money, let's start a business.

You're going to see more business failures because quite frankly, one of the reasons that a business works is you have to talk people into giving you money.

And if all of a sudden anyone who starts a business gets a $50,000 tax credit, I just think you're going to have a lot of shitty businesses started.

Now, is that to say there won't be winners there?

And I can feel people on the other side of this, just right now, just saying, oh my God, you don't like puppies.

You don't like small businesses.

No, I do.

But small, but the small business environment in America is very strong.

I don't like giveaways like this.

I think it should be, I don't want to say difficult to start a business, but

I don't think it should be easier.

And I think there'd be easier ways to get to this.

The thing I really don't like about Harris's economic policy is around housing, where it's if you're looking to buy a house, and I think if you're a first-time buyer or whatever, you get $25,000.

To me, that is just massively inflationary.

That just means starter homes everywhere go up by $25,000, if not more, because you can borrow more against that.

And I don't understand how that helps.

I love her ideas around making it easier to issue more housing permits.

Probably the reason housing prices have gone up so much is we took housing permits out of the hands of local officials and put them into the hands of homeowners who get very concerned with traffic once they have a home.

But I don't see how giving $25,000 to new homeowners is anything but inflationary and just going to do exactly the opposite of what they want to do, and that is makes housing less affordable.

What are your thoughts?

This is a tough one because I feel like it's a total campaign season policy, right?

And everyone wants the good feels and they want to hear all the right things about home ownership and how important it is to the quality of life for everyday Americans, right?

You have better schools, safer communities, more small businesses, your favorite.

Though I guess you said there were going to be too many, but you want people that are investing in their community and small businesses a way that they're doing that.

And so it sounds really sexy to say, I'm going to help you do this.

Now, everybody knows that just means the price of houses are going to go up another $25,000, right?

So if you're buying a $400,000 house, it's going to be $425,000.

What'll be interesting to see if what the banks are doing with all of this, if it actually goes through as a policy.

And I feel like it might be one that falls by the wayside

if and when she gets elected.

But

I agree with you on that.

I think it's also one of them to kind of return to the point of being here in this kind of raging moderate middle, when you see how aggravated people have gotten about student debt relief, even, which is something that I think you can make even a stronger argument for helping people out with, maybe not wiping out hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt, but certainly for people who've had Pell grants,

people who were scammed.

100% to get their money back.

But, you know, folks who went to do something and took on this big undertaking, maybe they want to go be a doctor and they don't go to one of the medical schools where Bloomberg's just going to wipe out your debt, that they should get a bit of help there.

I think that resonates better with the American public than getting just $25,000 towards you being able to buy a house.

I would push back a little bit, and that is as someone who borrowed money, as someone who's deeply involved in education, I've just always had trouble with the idea of two-thirds of the Americans that didn't have the opportunity to go to college bailing out the one-third that did.

So let me be clear, I think if you're going to go be a doctor in a rural community or a low-income community, or you're going to go into nursing or teaching where we're having a tough time attracting people, some sort of federal programs to release student debt is important.

I would like to see my school, NYU, and every other school, be on the hook for 20%, 30%, 50% of bad debt.

So we stop loaning $200,000 to philosophy majors who go on to be baristas and then can't pay this debt back.

It should be dischargeable in bankruptcy.

But there's something uncomfortable about...

You could argue the third of the American public that gets to go to college is arguably the most advantaged third.

And there's some really terrible situations where me and my colleagues prey on people because we want to make more money and that needs to stop.

But a three quarters of a trillion dollar bailout, what Biden proposed of student debt to me, and the worst thing about what I hate about student debt relief is it shrinks the tumor of student debt, but it doesn't go after the cancer.

And the cancer is the following.

We are just charging too much goddamn money.

I think it sucks to be a grown-up, and I think the people on the hook for student loans should be really angry at their university and that we need to stop this torrent, this typhoon of cheap credit that keeps driving up the cost of education.

So I really don't like student loan bailouts.

And my sense is they were found to be illegal.

They were.

Yeah.

Well, there are ways around it.

Are there?

Yeah, there are, I mean, there are policies, there are Department of Education policies, which is how the Biden-Harris administration has been able to give back so much that allow for it.

But yes, I mean, the Supreme Court gave it a big hell no

to just wiping out people's debts.

I think as an extension of what you were saying, though, you know, school, yes, it's too expensive.

And I have two little kids with the beginnings of their 529s.

And I just can't really fathom how much money.

is going to have to be in those accounts for them to be able to go to the four-year-old.

A million bucks at this point.

This point you're looking at.

It's even worse than what my financial advisor said.

For both of them, only a half a million each.

Unless they come to NYU and then it's more than that.

Well, if the podcast really works out, then everything's going to be fine.

There we go.

You're set.

You're done.

After this one episode.

But I feel like it's time, especially with if it's going to be Kamala, the prosecutor, and if she's going to talk about things like price gouging, if she's going to talk about her experience going after the big banks in California.

I wouldn't mind some sort of policy platform about going after universities, and especially these ones that are sitting on endowments that are, you know, being propped up by

investing groups, you know, that are doing their two and 20s or whatever it is.

And they're sitting on billions of dollars and they're not helping students out, maybe because they know that the administration might do that in the end, or most likely because they don't care.

And they're like, well, you're going to have a degree that says Harvard or whatever it is.

And now state schools are even, you know, for a regular person, astronomically expensive.

But I would love to see that.

And I think that would be popular across the board.

You know, if you're looking for a policy that everyone can glom onto, if you said, I'm going to go after the universities that are, that are stealing your money and giving you, in some cases, worthless degrees, you're going to end up like the barista that you were mentioning.

You know, landslide.

Stay with us.

What are some of the other central points of her economic plan?

I feel as if she hasn't done a great job so far of, and it feels like, quite frankly, a lot of giveaways.

What about on the revenue side?

They're going to raise taxes.

There's a wealth tax.

What else are they planning to do?

Trump has said he's going to tariff the shit out of everybody, and that's going to raise a ton of money.

How is she planning to increase revenues other than a wealth tax?

It's a lot of

just investing in the communities and regular, like the corporate rate, I don't think will go up further than it is.

I think they're toying with, and I need to get back on the website, the individual rate for the top, you know, the top top.

Now we're getting into like the tippy tippy tippy top versus the tippy tippy tippy top.

But I think that they are, and this is where she's going to rely back on actually the good economic news out of the Biden Harris administration.

You know, she has to toe that line of like, this is what I think was really good that we did.

This is what I think wasn't so great.

And I would have advised differently.

And we'll see how she does that at the debate.

So before we wrap up here, we have to talk about the debate.

It's being held.

We're taping on Monday.

Give us, I'd just be curious, just riff on what you think about this debate, what you're expecting, what you think each candidate needs to do and any predictions you might have.

So Trump needs to just act like a human.

And that's always been the bar for him.

And he's failed.

majority of the time, which, and I'm looking forward to that.

There was the big fight about whether the mics would be muted or not.

And Comola's Katmala's team obviously wanted them unmuted so they could see people really coming after her, especially when you have the gender dynamic and the size differential.

A lot of people have been focusing on that because, you know, she's quite short.

And he's, well, he was 6'4 before he started shrinking.

I'm not quite sure what he is now, but he's a big guy.

So I think for her, and we touched on this a little bit earlier in the podcast, a lot of people don't feel that they know her, especially people who are in the battleground state.

So I I think she's going to do a decent amount of the bio stuff again,

but not in like the mamala way.

In the this is what my background is, and this is how I brought those skills to the vice presidency, you know, senate vice presidency, and now hopefully as presidency.

And then I am ready on day one.

And there's a new ad out focusing on foreign policy where I actually thought she was the strongest at the DNC in her speech.

I thought it was incredible.

As commander-in-chief, I will ensure ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.

She's going to be using the contrast of all these folks that worked in foreign policy, the generals, et cetera, for Trump, who are now saying, I can't endorse him.

He's absolutely out of his mind.

We're going to be less safe.

She's going to lean into what a better force for good America will be if she is the next president.

But I really hope, and I don't think that we've talked about this yet in general, like she's not playing identity politics at all, which I think is part of why she's resonating as well as she has and has gotten this to a neck and neck race when Biden, you know, was on his way, I think, to a pretty resounding defeat.

You know, she never talks about being a woman.

She never talks about being a person of color.

She's just Kamala Harris.

And I think that he,

well, he would obviously love to be able to be as misogynistic and sexist and potentially racist as possible, but watching her kind of steer clear of those little potholes will be interesting.

I hope she can keep that up.

And I hope that the moderators really push him on explaining things.

This is probably one of the biggest uphill battles that I have on the five is, you know, people treat Donald Trump's presence, the fact that he's actually just out there standing in front of a podium or quote unquote taking questions as the fact that he's being transparent, but he's not actually explaining anything.

And now the policy pages are such a wonderful encapsulation of this.

So Kamala Harris has all of her policies with the dropdowns that explain them.

And Donald Trump just has a list of his policies.

And some of them are like, deport everyone.

Well, you know, how are you going to go around and find 15 million people that you're going to throw out of the country?

So

I hope that he's really pushed on detail because I think that she's pretty wonky and will be able to handle that well.

But she just needs to reassure like tens of thousands of people that it's going to be okay.

And Pennsylvania is really important for this.

And it's a topic for next week because I know you have a ton to say about it.

But I was reading about all of the ads that Trump is running in Pennsylvania and how they're

directed at young men.

She's doing much worse with men than Biden did in that New York Times Sienna poll, especially white working class men.

And he's just hammering that.

And so it'll be interesting to see if things like that come up as well.

So I believe that we're a much more Luxis nation and that as individuals, we're much more Luxus than we want to admit.

And I think Luxus aesthetics,

when people saw the Reagan-Carter debate, when they watched it on TV, they thought Reagan won.

And when they listened to it, they thought

Carter won.

And JFK let them put makeup on them.

And anyone who watched it thought Kennedy won.

And anyone who listened to it thought Nixon nixon one i think looks are important and i think that plays huge advantage to her she's an attractive non-white young woman i didn't know she was short i've never met her she actually she looks kind of whatever i assume she'll be wearing heels but the fact that she also is wearing converse a lot you know she's really like she's a little pistol yeah Really?

I didn't know that.

I thought she was kind of of average height, so to speak.

By the way, he claims he's 6'3215.

John Elway is 6'3215.

And so John Elway and Donald Trump, yeah, they're mirror images of each other.

Same diet.

I've heard, the cheeseburger

ice cream.

Yeah.

Physically, yeah.

So I think she wins just moment one on that count.

I have a thesis here, and I want you to, I want to get your reaction to it.

And that is, and this

plays into my bias that young men are the only special interest group that have been totally ignored recently, who are really struggling.

And I think old men are going Trump, young women are going Harris.

I do think similar to just as the election will be won by a handful of states, I think the overlooked crowd here that is sort of up for grabs is young men, because there's a bit of a myth that young men are all fucked up in the head and they're incels and they're angry and they're attracted to the manosphere and Trump.

And I think what some of the research shows is that it's not that they're moving towards the Republican Party.

Gen Z and millennial men actually believe just as much in in gender equality

as their female counterparts.

They're actually quite progressive around gender equality.

I think what's happening is they're not moving towards the Republican Party.

I think they're moving away from the Democratic Party.

And the thing that just blew my mind, Jess, was I went on the DNC.org website, and it has a section that says, who we serve.

And it lists 16 demographic groups, everyone from the disabled to veterans to immigrants to the disabled to Pacific Islanders to blacks to women, rural Americans, farmers.

By my calculations, they listed somewhere between 70 and 80% of America.

The only people they didn't list were men.

And when you are in this, I think the Democratic Party is struggling with the same problem that the DEI apparatus at universities is struggling with, and that is when you claim to be explicitly advocating and advancing the interests of 75% of your population, you aren't advantaging them.

You're discriminating against the 25%.

And I think that's how a lot of young men feel.

They just, quite frankly, don't feel seen by the Democratic Party.

And I don't think it would be hard to recapture them.

I think they are very much pro-life.

A lot of them have more progressive inclinations.

A lot of them are turned off by Trump.

But I think at a minimum, they need to say, all right, what are you doing to help my community that is killing themselves at four times the rate, is addicted at three times the rate, is less likely to go to college, is having trouble finding a mate because women are dating older, quite frankly?

I just feel like a little bit of something, a recognition of the problem, vocational programming, expanded freshman seats, national service.

Even taking a victory lap around the Infrastructure Act, which supposedly the 70% of the jobs are going to be for men without college degrees, but they don't want to talk about it because they're worried it'll ruffle the feathers of the far left.

What do you think about the idea of young men being the swing voters up for grabs here?

I like it.

I mean, it's a great headline

and it'll get you a lot of buzz, which we're always looking for in life.

But I think it's also, I think it's true.

And I actually think it's even more base than what you're saying.

I think that if you said, we don't think that you're bad, that it would be enough.

Like, yeah, we don't think you're toxic?

Right.

Like,

I don't fundamentally think that you're broken because you're a white dude.

And it's been interesting.

You know, we,

my friends, we all have little kids, and a lot of them who had sons

were worried about what culture is going to be like for them.

You know, these are going to be kids who have enough, who go to great schools, either a good private school or a great public school that they're zoned for, are on their way to college.

They're going to be raised by, you know, in loving households with dads that support their moms, you know, all the good things, right?

They're going to be pro-choice.

They're going to care about the climate.

They're going to think that there are too many guns on the street and that school shootings are one of the most abhorrent stains on American culture that there is.

But they're not going to be spoken to as equals.

They're going to have to do double the work, triple the work to be a quote, ally in the right way.

And I don't know if you remember this t-shirt that was going around that you would see like the future is female.

And I've seen less of it lately, but it really did.

What about books called The End of Men?

Yeah.

Well, that too,

as the corollary to the t-shirt, like buy my t-shirt and then buy this book.

And I do think, you know, I don't know if you're following that horrendous trial in France

about the 70-year-old woman whose husband let dozens of men come and rape his wife, drugged her.

And I think

it's really interesting in context with like the default position that men are so bad.

Obviously, that is the most extreme case in the entire world.

But when you hear about things like that, and you, I mean, you're not going to hear about a woman that did something like that.

I mean, maybe there's some apparation example of it, but you look at things like that and you see it just being pumped into the culture that men are the ones that are capable of these kinds of things, right?

Like men are the ones that would be doing the bad things.

I think it permeates further than it should.

Yeah, I think it's a big opportunity.

So just as we wrap up here, who do you think,

regarding the debate, who do you think wins and why?

What do you think the narrative will be?

Make a prediction.

Who wins and why?

And then I'll give you my thoughts.

I think Kamala wins because I think that she has, since she's taken over the nomination, understood the task at hand, which is to message to these raging moderates, these swing state voters, to make her somebody that is hopeful, joyful, and progressive in the progress sense of the word, not in the liberal sense of the word, and that she will

contextualize a vision for America that's more palatable to the widest swath of people.

But for Trump supporters, he will do fine, but she's the one who has a ceiling that can continue to grow.

And we know that he caps out about where he is right now.

I like it.

I hope you're right.

My prediction is that he wins by virtue of the fact that I think expectations have been set so high for her and so low for him.

And also,

I think the coronation, not competition, I don't think she's battle tested.

I think when you have candidates go through the primary process, they are quick on their feet.

They know how to deflect criticism.

They know how to, you know, they know how to see a weak point and go after it.

I don't think she's, I think she's out of practice.

Anyways,

I hope I'm wrong as well.

I mean, that sincerely.

Anyways, that's all for the inaugural episode of Raging Moderates.

We're raging, Jess.

We're raging.

Raging.

Our producer, raging.

Our producers, Caroline Shagren and Drew Burroughs is our technical director.

You can find Raging Moderates on the Prop GPod every Tuesday.

Please subscribe.

We will see you next week.

Thanks, everybody, for tuning in.

Have a great rest of the week, Jess.

Thank you, you too.