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Wilfred Reilly: Post 2024 U.S. Election Analysis
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Political scientist Professor Wilfred Riley of Kentucky State University returns to Real Clear to share his unique insights into the recent U.S. presidential election. We explore why Kamala Harris's defeat was more about her own campaign missteps, lackluster appeal, and public speaking challenges rather than the oversimplified ideological explanations often touted.
Diving into the Democratic Party's challenges, we question whether "woke" ideology and the decision to back Kamala Harris without a primary challenge were strategic missteps. Could a centrist figure like Joe Manchin have shifted the tide? We dig into the intricacies of race and gender politics, particularly the pivotal role of the black male vote, and consider whether a pivot to more centrist policies might better serve the Democrats in future elections.
We also scrutinize Donald Trump's governance style and the importance of assembling a competent leadership team. Comparing Trump's past reliance on controversial figures with the need for experienced advisors, we assess his recent proposals on tariffs and taxes and their potential impact. Join us for a thought-provoking conversation that challenges conventional wisdom and explores practical paths forward for both parties.
And welcome back to Real Clear everybody. I am joined yet again by the favorite guest here on Real Clear, and that is Professor Wilfred Riley. He is a political scientist from Kentucky State University. He is also the author of bestselling and excellent books, including Taboo, as well as the most recent Lies my Liberal Teacher Told Me Fact-filled, research-based and well-articulated arguments. I recommend that you read them. You can find them on Amazon link below, and I wanted to have the professor on to talk about, of course, a tiny little event that we had going on in America this past week. This is November 7th that we are recording. Two days ago, donald Trump swept the United States in a landslide victory over Kamala Harris, and we are here to talk about the political analysis. So, professor Riley, a lot of people in the country right now are elated about the outcome, some are distraught and some are not sure what to make of the outcome. What are your reactions to the results of the election?
Speaker 2:Well, I mean I'm a right-leaning former business guy so I'm pleased Trump won. I mean I voted for Democrats before. I mean I still think one of the better presidents of my lifetime was Bill Clinton. He's the only one who balanced the budget. You know unfortunate taste for younger women as a sideline, we now know. But you know, in general, I'm pleased that the party I most often vote for these days won the election. I thought kamala harris was a a very bad candidate, which was was almost I wanted to get into that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, yeah, but I mean it's as a as a black guy. I think at some level you would have maybe a five percent boost of in-group affiliation for someone on the team. The first female president would be interesting See how she'd do.
Speaker 2:But I mean we're not talking about Condi Rice or Margaret Thatcher or something like that. I mean Kamala Harris is someone who polled at two percent when she actually ran for president herself. Biden kind of picked her off the scrap heap because she was a black woman. There were no other minority women in that race, I think maybe Tulsi, but no one else that he would have found appropriate, and before that not really all that accomplished. I mean she won her AG race by a couple of points in California against a Republican. I mean she's a famously bad speaker. I mean she was a DA who only individually tried about nine cases.
Speaker 2:I don't mean to put together some kind of Martin Luther style brief against Kamala Harris, but I mean I think that Trump is a former president, a fairly competent one, so I have no objections to him winning. I think we're going to be looking at a couple of entertaining years coming, though, as the left reacts and the right gloats and people online threatened to self-terminate or whatever the approved language is. So that, I think, is the backstory. The election itself I'm fairly pleased by. I'm not all that surprised by it was rated as 55, 45 or 52, 48 going down the stretch.
Speaker 1:Now. I wanted to get into a post-mortem on the Harris campaign, so I'm glad you went there. Those are where my instincts go as well. So many people now are reacting as though the reason that Trump won is because of well, fill in the blank misogyny, racism, homophobia, etc. People on the left side of the spectrum right now. But they tend to ignore the obvious question, which is if Trump is a relatively ineffective political candidate and, in my opinion, while he has very admirable characteristics like resilience, grit, et cetera, his capacity to screw things up with things that he says that are so outrageous and can be themselves subject to media capitalization is just profound. So one would think that if you have such a flawed, vulnerable candidate like Donald Trump, how bad does the opponent have to be to lose in a landslide to such a man? Opponent have to be to lose in a landslide to such a man? And that obvious question seems to really evade those on the left right now, and I think it's incumbent upon us to do a postmortem on just how bad the campaign was. Let me bring up some bullet points to just to kind of spark plugs to your engine here. A tax on unrealized capital gains, in other words, a punishment of effective investing Statements that the First Amendment is a privilege, not a right, as you'd mentioned.
Speaker 1:Just a straight up terrible interviewer. I've almost never seen someone and scratch that. I have never seen someone this inept at interviewing in the public space. I've simply never seen someone as ineffective and obviously evasive in interviews, and this has to have had an effect on voters throughout the nation. These seem to me to be much more reasonable post-mortem observations of the Harris campaign. Reasonable post-mortem observations of the Harris campaign, as opposed to simply saying 75, what it looks like it's going to be 75 to 76 million people who voted for Donald Trump are all themselves racist, homophobes, misogynists, don't you agree? And where would you go with that, professor Riley?
Speaker 2:I think that the immediate instinct on the part of the Democratic pundit class I mean I listened to Al Sharpton on MSNBC the other day the View I mean these are pretty good summaries of what they've all been saying, twitter and so on the immediate reaction that this must be due to racism and sexism, I think that's just straight up woke mind virus. I mean, as a site guy you might be able to describe the actual pathway there, but once you've learned kind of a set of habits or work ways for the world, you tend to try to fit everything into that. And I mean the democratic, the modern liberal model is this sort of weird power dynamic analysis that comes out of critical theory, and I think this is mostly bullshit. Like if you look at whether systems structured by group X invariably benefit group X, in political science, the answer is that they don't. About 70, 80% of the time. I mean whites are not the highest scores on the SAT. People seem perfectly capable of creating pretty fair structures, foot races and so on, but that's that's not what the contemporary left believes.
Speaker 2:So the idea is, when you see a black woman run against a white man, the first question I think someone like nicole hannah jones or richard delgado would say, is where did racism manifest in this situation? That was their racism. And then you start talking about harris is in an interracial marriage, harris is a black woman, harris is south asian, and you just go down that path and you list all the things. The reality, though, is that if we were doing regression or something that would be one variable, you know, bias, x and everything else had a much larger role, Like the two things I think are. Just, basically, you had a bad candidate and she had bad policies. So, like a sentence on each bad candidate, again, harris pulled it two percent running for president. She's a bad interviewer. She's viewed as at least mildly corrupt, given like the willie brown roots of her career. Just on and on and on. So not not particularly impressive and really notably roasted on a couple of occasions by, again, tulsi gabbard. I recall on one occasion, hillary clinton, I mean, like there were, you could see her interact with elite women and not perform very well against elite women. Might have gotten some of the names a bit wrong there, but like that's point one, and point two is just the Biden administration, in my opinion, was a disaster, like I can see where, from a union labor standpoint, you might view him as an okay to good president, but like looking at everything else union labor standpoint you might view him as an okay to good president, but like looking at everything else, I mean he didn't handle COVID any better than Trump did. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, died. We lost a war in Afghanistan. I mean we literally pulled out in the Taliban. Don't let women talk in public.
Speaker 2:Now you know um record. Opiate overdose is crime. In 21 and 22. Covid played some role, but this is mostly George Floyd effect. I mean it surged over 20,000 murders a year. Illegal immigration we've had 12 million illegals enter the country. So Harris is kind of stuck in a crosshairs trap here, because either she can say well, I'm very experienced and qualified, now I'm not the person that sucks anymore. I was a vice president in a successful presidential administration, but then she has to take responsibility for that whole record. I'm a little different from Joe Biden. Joe and I weren't always the best of friends. I'm an Obama gal, but then you get back to well, then, what have you done? You're the 2% candidate. So just a lot of easy tripwires for her.
Speaker 1:I think this is so important because my position is that it's better for the nation long run if the Democrat Party if any party learns from their failures and learns from the weak spots in their campaigns and their party politics so that they can more accurately or more broadly represent American sentiments. And at the Democrat Party right now, if they're going to be listening to the pundits who are starting to come out and say the predictable things about why this happened, they're never going to improve and that's going to lead to this endless race to the bottoms that we've been seeing in our politics endless race to the bottoms that we've been seeing in our politics. And so I don't know how they explain, for instance, the fact that Trump got more of a percentage of black men than any Republican candidate in history, why he rallied Latinos to his side in unprecedented numbers and, moreover, why the prediction that women would show up for Harris did not come to fruition whatsoever. They underperformed for her by around four percentage points, especially in key swing states, as far as I understand. And so if this is a misogyny problem, a racist problem and so forth, those numbers really expose the fallacy of that presumption, and I've not heard anyone respond to that in a way that makes any sense at all? I'm not sure if you've heard anyone respond to that in a way that makes any sense at all. I'm not sure if you've heard anyone respond credibly to that.
Speaker 1:But my broader question would be to you, professor, do you think that the Democrat Party is going to move more now in a Joe Manchin direction? And I firmly believe that if Manchin, say, for instance, was the candidate, the outcome probably would not have been like this. It could have been, but it would have actually been close or Manchin would have won. They have to know that. So why didn't they know that in advance? Because anybody knew on the front end I'm sure you knew, I'm sure your bright colleagues on the Democrat side knew this going in that you don't coronate someone like Kamala Harris, as you've just described her. You don't do that at all if you care about the outcome. So two questions why do you think they coronated Kamala Harris and bypassed an open convention, something that, as far as I can tell, has never been done in American history? And then number two does the Democrat Party move more toward the center as a result of this landslide?
Speaker 2:Well, I think that all of the answers to all of your questions get back to this same issue, which is the prevalence of the adoption of this quote unquote extreme, woke ideology by most thought leaders on the left and even in liberal politics. So why did they stage a coronation for Harris? Why was there no short primary, with Gavin Newsom and people like this involved? The short answer is that Harris is a black woman. I mean, black women are a base that votes for the Democrats almost fanatically. So this election, trump won about 12 to 13 percent of black, but Trump won almost 30 percent of black men and when you think about that, that means that something like 94, 95, maybe a little more percent of black women had to vote for Kamala Harris, of black women had to vote for Kamala Harris, I mean, and there was genuine excitement in that demographic people out at polling places with sorority pens and sweaters on and so on.
Speaker 2:So the basic answer there is you couldn't get rid of the black vice president and promote a blonde political schemer like Gavin Newsom over her without having a civil war in your political party, because the idea immediately is well, it immediately gets caught up in this race and gender stuff. Right, like it's a black woman's time. We built this country, whole country was built by slaves and you ain't going to let a queen descended from them Harris is not, by the way, you know go forward and take the lead that that wasn't feasible. The question that you're really asking is like, at the broader level, is it feasible for the dems to ditch this stuff and pursue real sane policy and just yeah?
Speaker 2:because the snake ate its tail yeah, well, the the problem is this is the same thing with the real theacons on the right, but Many people have accepted a framework for understanding existence that has only one disadvantage. It's simple, it's clear. The disadvantage is that it's not real. So the idea that all gaps in group performance are caused by bias, or that the structuring motivation when humans put together societies is power and brutality as opposed to fairness, honor, love, et cetera, these claims really don't seem to be true and they've been empirically tested with lots of large data sets.
Speaker 2:The things that people had against the Harris era Democratic Party were quite empirical. I mean 12 million illegals walked into this country over the past four years. We've seen complete lunacy from the transgender movement. I mean, I assume you've seen that famous picture of Admiral Rachel Levine in a dress uniform, a woman's dress uniform standing next to Sam Brinton, the luggage thief guy who's got a mustache, he's got a bald head and then like a nice little frock on, like a blue just below the rear party dress. You know people looking at that sort of stuff are not going to be enthused about this party. If you're talking about like Jose in Del Rio, texas, the question is whether the Democrats can understand that, like how much would it cost them to cut DEI and all of that out of their platform, out of their Right?
Speaker 1:That's the question. Or to repackage something about their positions on those matters into a more digestible form, if that's possible. But up until now, the form that they tend to use is here are the positions you accept it, or you're a bigot, homophobe, et cetera, et cetera. This seems to be this election result seems to be a referendum, at least partly, on those positions. So it'll be something to see what happens with the Democrat Party. They have to be tooling around as to as to what this all means Before we move on to what's in store for the country under a second Trump administration. I have to ask you, as a black man, when you heard Michelle Obama say, or announce to you that it was, if you didn't vote for Kamala Harris? It's your rage that is damaging women, specifically black women, in the country. What did you think of that, professor Riley?
Speaker 2:I think people are just incredibly tired of hearing this bullshit. I am myself, I mean. We both already laid out kind of the woke framework. Every gap in performance is due to discrimination. It must be remedied by the successful. It's a kind of lower IQ version of race Marxism. But what? How did I feel?
Speaker 2:So, yeah, michelle Obama is is arguing from that framework when she gave what, in some respects, was a pretty good speech, but there was really just sort of scolding of black and, for that matter, white men. The argument is that black men are less likely to vote for Kamala Harris than black women. Is it that men dislike women, who seem to be quote unquote bitchy? Or that men have a much higher level of intolerance? I guess you'd put it for perceived incompetence? That's been documented over and over again, as you know. Is it that black men are less racially affiliated than black women, which some what do you link fate studies seem to find? Those are all complex possible explanations, but no, I mean the idea that she's going with is just no, you don't like women, you hate all women.
Speaker 2:And when I listened to that it was like well, I know, I don't hate women, you know I love my. I mean I don't think you hate women. You know I love my successful partner, my female friends, cousins, so that's not true. So the claim is false and I'm being harassed into doing something I don't want to do based on this false claim. Get out of here. And I think that's how. That's how most people feel. You know some tattoo shop owner with a Caucasian girlfriend and a baby daughter who's just trying to pay the bills. He knows that some level, that there's no such thing as the institutional patriarchy in the modern United States. So this just seems like a bunch of people lying and bitching at him until he gets up to do something, and that's not the preferred male mode of communication with women. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, crazy, right, he gets up to do something, and that's not the preferred male mode of communication with women.
Speaker 1:You don't say yeah.
Speaker 2:Crazy Right. So I've been doing a little more of the talking, but I do want to make one point here, like this again, it's not just the content, it's tone and behavior. So the main way in which the Democrats tried to communicate with men, especially young and fairly successful men probably the worst group for this during this election campaign was literally griping and bitching. It was just sort of saying like don't you love your daughter? How could you do this? Don't you care about my right to selective late term abortion? You bastard.
Speaker 2:And I think that in general, trying to get people to do things by telling them they are bad people who are part of a negative group of oppressors and if they pursue the thing that obviously benefits them, they are doing evil that's never going to be effective and I really don't think they understand that. And I think part of this is that they have almost no heterosexual white male consultant. If you look at some of the names behind these ads or the firms that are putting them together like that crazy ad with all the guys like I'm a man man turned out like all those guys were like bisexual actors from California. You can look that up Like none of them were real. They weren't the guys they were playing. They don't own gyms.
Speaker 1:It was absurd, it was completely absurd. They're playing around with, either intentionally or implicitly, the psychology and politics of shame, and that's a very strange thing to do if you have any grasp as to what has tended to cause an uprising in successful politics all the way down from dictatorial and even fascist regimes all the way to successful democratic administrations. One of the common cores of all of them is the imbuing of positivity to the populace that supports them. Those are just basic historical facts, and it seems to escape them, I think, of the Democrat party right now. They seem to be for any anybody out there who is a game of Thrones follower. They're like the sparrows, the high sparrows, who remember the religious zealots from a game of Thrones, and they would walk around with clubs and they would, they would um mutilate their foreheads with these strange signs, and they had this, this um delusional sense of righteousness that they felt morally righteous enough to be able to impress upon others and impugn others for not embracing. The democrat party is starting to evince those characteristics, and so it's. My own view is it's very possible that they're gripped by a secular religion through an embrace of their own politics, to the extent that they're so saturated with the doctrine that their moral lens will not allow them to see outside of it. I think I'm just reflecting in different terms some of the things you've said.
Speaker 1:Now, professor Riley, there are some concerns as to Trump's economic policies that I'd like to ask you about. I'm not so sure what his actual intentions are with tariffs, but for people who are listening, for historical reference, the last presidents who used tariffs for economic policy were J Edgar Hoover, and that was obviously terrible in 1930. And I believe Woodrow Wilson played around with tariffs he was a famous socialist president for all intensive purposes. These are largely thought, even by conservative economic scholars, to have deeply contributed to worldwide decline, and Trump has the idea that he's going to embrace tariffs. I'm not sure. Here's my question for you, professor. I'm not sure how much of that is him wanting to have something in his tool case that he can use to leverage international politics and trade agreements with, but he doesn't really intend to use very much or if he really believes that he can use tariffs and in a way that is different than the catastrophe of the 1930s. But I'm concerned about that. Do you have any ideas?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, I think Trump says a lot of shit. I mean it's quick and crude, but that's a. That's a pretty good description of the guy. I mean he's a very successful businessman, but I don't. I don't really think he knows anything about the history of us tariff policy. I think he shoots from the hip very often and I I think any competent staff and the big thing for big trump this time is to get a competent staff, not constant back and forths with genuinely skilled people like rex tillerson. Well, meanwhile, you've got omarosa in the background and all that he needs. He needs a good group, um, right from the start, and that, by the way, is the one thing that project 2025 might prove useful for.
Speaker 2:A huge chunk of that, if you've read the whole 900 page behemoth is just no, I have my name. You said you have not. No, have you? Oh, a lot of it. I mean, I fly in a while. It's it literally.
Speaker 2:Project 2025 is not some kind of horrifying conspiracy theory from the shadows. It's a policy brief that's as dead boring as anything I've ever read from mostly Claremont inherited like right leaning, but absolutely respectable think tank. Inherited like right-leaning but absolutely respectable think tank, but the the notable thing about it is that it contains a series of suggestions for literally everything the government could do. So in education, I recall they favored getting rid of the department of education, but it goes beyond that, like more standardized testing, less bilingual education, just on and on and on. But the thing that's useful about the whole giant bible length uh book and I suppose you probably could buy this as a book or print a pdf if this is this is your thing a little light reading but the notable thing about it is that there's a list of all of the republicans who would be suitable for certain high-level government jobs, and I I think that's genuinely useful.
Speaker 2:Like a problem on the right and this goes back at least to Bush in Iraq Remember trying to find people that were leaned to the right but they were capable of doing things like running cities, and most were pretty good. But he had these famous incidents where he'd hire people just out of the Ivy League to do things like oversee the sanitation of a mid-sized town and he appropriately took hits for that. Anyway, to resolve this problem, project 2025 literally gives a directory. Trump should get a good team together that'll tell him what to do, but I think once he does that a lot of the stuff he's been saying, like he also suggested getting rid of the income tax.
Speaker 1:Yeah, welcome news on any business owner's end, but the idea that tariffs are going to be the way to replace income taxes seems just crazy.
Speaker 2:It's also there's. No, that's not plausible. I mean. So the US federal government's budget is between three and seven trillion dollars a year, depending on what you're throwing in black budget, so on, and that's funded primarily by taxes, like we're in debt, but we also collect five to six trillion in tax annually because because you have a high, a high income society of 350 million people, like I don't know how much caviar and how many pianos we ship in at our you know 18 million port, but it's gonna be you're.
Speaker 2:You're not gonna replace x with y and you yeah, you can't just say well, there's a, there's a 400 hundred dollar surcharge on every five hundred dollar television that samson ships yeah, at some point that goes into the price of the product.
Speaker 1:You know, and you know, professor, this is something that is concerning me about the mega base at present. You can forgive people left of center for being a bit skeptical of his base when every time he says something that is, in Joe Rogan's words, wild shit, and they gobble it up as though it is absolute truth, so to speak. They don't question it. They will talk to you almost reliably about how great an idea tariffs is, because it's going to, you know, be hard on China. That's about as in-depth as the thinking gets, not for all of them, of course, you know, but for a fair number of people. So I do think that to some extent it's understandable for the liberal left to be a little bit skeptical right now as to the, a little bit skeptical right now as to the, let's say, equanimity that might possess or dispossess his cabinet, and that's what I'm. So I think you're absolutely correct.
Speaker 1:The character, profile and general disposition of his cabinet has to be key in his appointments. Now he's going to get here's another question for you. I'm lining them up. I'm sorry, but he's got a what 54 in the Senate and so he's going to get all of his appointments through right. There's not going to be any delay in that. Do you have the sense that he is going to really, this time, not be doing things like Omarosa or Scaramucci my God, right from the first go around? Does he have a sense? Is this the same Trump? In other words?
Speaker 2:What I'm hearing is no, actually. I mean and this is a lot of this is like secondhand Twitter DM level stuff. You know consultants on one side or the other side. But no, what I hear is that Trump is genuinely angry because of what he perceives as a bunch of kangaroo court trials against him and he's coming into office as the guy who did make five or six billion dollars in his life, runs a very successful company, I mean the Trump. The Trump brand has built small cities in New York, housing developments, eight thousand people. I mean he has his own people from that brand. He's got the Project 2025 folks. He made many connections his first time in office. So I think Trump is coming back and actually has like an angry, competent eye on what he wants to do.
Speaker 2:Now again, trump's 78. And Trump still obviously has diarrhea of the mouth. He still spouts off. He's by no means going to be perfect, but I do get the impression unless all these right-wing pundits are just lying to me, because we're all on the right, you never know but that Trump is going to be a lot more focused, a lot more committed, and he's also surrounded himself with kind of a pretty good inner circle. I mean Elon Musk is kind of palling up with Trump. Good inner circle, I mean, elon Musk is kind of palling up with Trump. They're doing events together and again, elon Musk is the richest man in the world. That's another guy that really knows how to run a business, that has a potential hiring pool for things on the tech side or in the sciences and whatever number of tens of thousands of employees.
Speaker 2:You know, tulsi Gabbard is involved with what Trump is doing. Ron and Rand Paul are involved now with what Trump is doing. A shout out to Dave Gornosky, who apparently interviewed Ron Paul and got Paul to say he wanted to work with some of the Department of Government Efficiency style stuff. You know, this is your guy. Rfk Jr is involved. I mean, so there's a whole squad of people around Trump that are trying to push him toward, if not normalcy, normalcy, competence, and I think that has a pretty good chance of succeeding. But I I agree with you as a last comment about the mega base and I try not to do this because they already take so much heat like if you joke about poor whites in the usa, it's the least brave thing you can do you know that, that's one of the new groups that's still approved as a comedic target.
Speaker 2:Ah, those rednecks, you know, um, and to some extent that's funny, because rednecks and blacks have almost exactly the same social pathology. And, if you ever point that out, the conversation this ghost did in a liberal room in the south, what about the?
Speaker 2:other half of the murders. Well, my god, you can't no stop, um. But I guess I'm saying here, the MAGA base very often does seem to view Trump in almost a messianic fashion, where there are all these videos of both Southern Caucasian and working class African-American preachers literally praying over the guy, people buying trading cards with his face on them. Like you were mickey mantle, um, you know he's selling statues of himself and like gold pins he signed shit with in the oval office allegedly uh, that I really I don't identify that much with. I think politicians are public servants. We should be hypercritical of them. Like trump's not coming to save you. This is a guy who lives in a penthouse with a golden toilet in it. He just kind of of likes working class Americans and we have to keep him directed, and I think that that is a very important point.
Speaker 1:So I know you've got to go, professor. As a last statement, is there anything that you can say that you think is important for both sides of the aisle? One singular sentiment.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that. So I didn't understand the concept of thinking outside the box until I got older and I realized a lot of the shit that people actually believed for me. And I'm not. I don't think I'm any great genius, although I have a high tested IQ, but there hasn't really ever been a bot Like I. Grew up with an upper class mom in the hood and did all this stuff crazy sales jobs, lived overseas briefly but memorably, you know just all of this kind of stuff. I went to an elite law school but then came back home to help with the family health crisis and spent years doing things like street canvassing and working for a lot of money but in the boiler room type environments, and just on and on and on, and it always seemed to me that there were many different ways to approach the world. Ultimate moral rules probably don't exist at all, although you should be honorable, you know obviously. Clearly many societies Arabia, india are entirely different from the USA across almost every metric, but, if not equally successful, quite competitive with us. India just went to the moon. So I didn't really understand the frameworks that a lot of people have. Where you really do read one book, whether that's the Bible or white fragility, the first being the better option, but model your entire, your entire life way on that. So, getting to the point, like with the left, Democrats need to understand that the framework of critical racial theory that's existed for about 15, 20 years at any prominent level in the academy is not real. Bias may be a statistically significant variable that explains two or three percent of that, but you also have to look at what their platform was, what their policy positions were, so on. If you ask these intelligent Hispanic blue collar aristocrats to use Paul Fussell's term who are voting for Trump, why they voted for Trump, they say policy. You know, I'm a Mexican guy but I want to seal the border. So the Dems have to change their framework and I also think the Republicans have to change their framework to some extent when it comes to things like almost worshiping the boss man, El Patron, the guy who's at the top of the heap. You really you see that a lot. I mean George Bush frequently got got. I mean there's nothing wrong with praying over people in church, but this happened in public places. You know people had I did two or three friends that had bobblehead dolls of the guy there that that idea of venerate big chief.
Speaker 2:I think the Republicans need to pull back from a little bit and and I I guess this is this is the conclusion of both these statements for both moral and immoral reasons. People need to take a practical, multivariate look at the world and see what works, what doesn't and what voters actually want. And to some extent, I think the stuff that I really feel this way about on the right tends to deal with private fertility and sexual decisions. So a lot of Republicans and I don't think he'd mind being mentioned in this context I'm Matt Walsh, who I'm casually quite friendly with, nice guy, but, as I understand, if he had his way, he would ban IVF, any in vitro fertilization, would ban surrogacy, would ban not just abortion after 11 weeks.
Speaker 2:We all agree there's some moral issue, but the abortion pill, plan B, and I think that those ideas are as widely rejected by the overall electorate between 57 percent in Florida, 71 percent in Nebraska, we just saw as anything on the left. So there's a huge open window for politicians that will go outside box and will just do stuff that works like competent adults, and that's what I think so many citizens are looking for stuff that works like competent adults.
Speaker 1:And that's what I think so many citizens are looking for. I hope you're right. I hope both parties hear this podcast and hear your advice. So, professor Wilford Riley, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks, as always, for having me on.