Stop focusing on polls and go hiking instead

Hello everyone. Peter Zeihan here, from Colorado. Many of you have written to us asking how the attempted assassination of Donald Trump affects my predictions for the 2024 presidential election. The answer is very simple: I have no idea.

I know of only one example in American history where someone who was clearly on the verge of winning the nomination was the target of an assassination attempt. That person was Teddy Roosevelt. Before those of you who are pro-Trump say, “Yeah, yeah, compare Trump to Roosevelt,” it did not end well for Roosevelt. First of all, he finished his speech. Secondly, he suffered one of the most catastrophic losses in American history to none other than Woodrow Wilson.

So, you know, be careful what you wish for. That’s not what I’m predicting. What I’m saying is that the American experience with political violence at this level is very, very limited. Knowing the impact that it’s going to have on elections, it’s not that it’s a negligible factor. It’s something that we just don’t know how to predict.

Right now, it’s kind of in the air. What I can tell you is that you should absolutely not pay attention to polls, especially right now. There are three factors at play. First, most polls ask 1,000 or 2,000 people. They have a margin of error. They ask, “Would you vote for candidate A or candidate B?” And then they give you the results. That’s a horrible way to do polls in the United States for three reasons.

First, independents, who make up only 10 percent of the electorate but have decided most elections over the last 50 years, pay no attention to polls and don’t even respond to them until after the political conventions. This week we finished the Republican National Convention. But the Democratic convention isn’t until August 19, I believe. So you shouldn’t be paying attention to polls until the first week of September.

Second, the way Americans do polls is very different from the way they vote for their candidates. It’s not like everybody just puts themselves in one group and whoever gets the most votes wins. No, no, no, no. It’s done by state with the Electoral College. Each state has a certain number of electors. The way it works, through a combination of laws and traditions, is that if a state records that a candidate got one more vote than the second-place finisher, that candidate gets all the electors.

For example, in my home state of Iowa, there are seven electoral votes. I think it’s been a long time since I’ve been there. If you have 14 candidates running for president and one of them gets 20 percent of the vote, which is more than all the others, they get all seven electoral votes. Until you’re in a situation where you’re looking at state polls instead of national polls, and you can visualize them on a map, polls are useless.

Third, third-party candidates. They’re not really being counted in the polls right now. If you go back to the 2000 Gore-Bush race, all the polls were pointing to Al Gore winning because they didn’t know that Ralph Nader was on the ticket in a lot of states. Nader was not a popular candidate, had no chance of winning, and only got a few national votes, concentrated in enough states to sway support away from Al Gore and give the election to George W. Bush by a relatively narrow margin.

This time we have a candidate from another party, RFK Jr., who is a complete and utterly insane conspiracy theorist. Donald Trump thought he had already wooed that part of the electorate. Now, having RFK in the mix means that even in places where Donald Trump was expected to win very clearly, RFK Jr. could suddenly lose enough support for Biden to win the state.

Anyway, none of this can be recorded until the polls change. That won’t happen until September. Let me give you a little hint as to what I’m looking for. There’s a website that does all the aggregation for you and only includes the high-quality polls. It’s called 270 to Win. It’s 270towin.com. It does it by state. The best part about that website is that if you don’t think so because you think you know better for whatever reason, maybe you live there, maybe it’s your job, you can go through it and click and change the alignment for each individual state to see how it plays out.

This screenshot you see right now is what it’s like on July 18th. It’s my last day here. I’m going hiking tomorrow, so you can all scream into the void if you don’t like what I have to say. Right now, the polls are recording the impact of Biden’s atrocious performance in the debate a few weeks ago. As you can see, the race is still up in the air.

We haven’t seen the impact of JD Vance being nominated as Donald Trump’s running mate yet. But again, if polls matter, wait until September. Watch this in September. Watch this especially after the Democratic convention is over in late August. I would normally have made this video then, but I won’t be back then.

So, this is to give you something to think about while I do something other than follow American politics.