Watch the full episode HERE
Good evening. It is Monday, November 4h. I'm Michael Tracey, filling in once again for the enigmatic Glenn Greenwald, who is off doing something or other tonight. But we're going to have a jam-packed show for you because, as you might be aware, tonight is the eve of the 2024 presidential election, and therefore, there is much to discuss.
I'm here in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, where the poor citizens of Pennsylvania have been absolutely inundated with campaign propaganda for an interminable period of time at this point, and hopefully will soon receive some relief. But for now, welcome to a new episode of System Update starting right now.
Pennsylvania, as everybody is tediously aware, is ground zero for the 2024 campaign. The amount of propaganda that everybody is being bombarded with in this state is astounding. It was probably similar in previous years, but now it just seems like it's reaching a new level. You cannot turn on the television without seeing five consecutive ads from politicians who are criticizing other politicians. It's just suffusing the entire commonwealth and people might kind of just not be inhabiting the same world if you live in, I don't know, Vermont or Arkansas or Kentucky or Massachusetts or some other place that's not seen as hotly contested in this election. It's obviously to do with the structure of the U.S. electoral system where we allocate electors by popular vote in individual states, and then whoever gets the majority in the Electoral College wins. Therefore, people pour into the states that are seen to be the most critical to winning the Electoral College. And here we are in Pennsylvania.
I've been across the country covering the elections. I've been in Nevada, I've been in Arizona, I've been in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and now here I am concluding the spirited and wonderful 2024 campaign season here. And tonight, I cap things off by just having gone to one of Donald J. Trump's final rallies. He could always, who knows, hold additional rallies if he wins or even if he loses, it's difficult to say, but at least as of this campaign cycle, one of his final rallies was this afternoon in Reading, Pennsylvania, spelled deceptively as ‘reading’ but all the locals know that it's pronounced Redding.
So, make sure you have that down if you ever want to become a political prognosticator and discuss this particular micro section of Pennsylvania, the commonwealth. And there was an interesting occurrence at this Trump campaign rally that I was there to witness myself, where he gave a curious shoutout to a particular political ally of his. And so, let's play that clip of Donald Trump today at the rally in Reading, Pennsylvania.
Video. C-SPAN. November 4, 2024.
Donald Trump: So normally you see all these jobs and everything, hundreds of thousands of jobs just because of the size. And they just announced, Mike, you'd be amazed at this, Mike. Look at our Mike. Look at that. He lost all that weight. You look so handsome. Stand up, Mike Pompeo. Stand up, Mike. He looks so handsome. Wow, man. I'm going to ask him how the hell did he do that? That's good. Good. That's great.
I was sitting actually behind Pompeo further up in the in the arena style seating, and I saw him stand up. He waved to the crowd. Trump prompted the crowd to give Mike Pompeo a nice round of applause. One of the few people that Trump actually singled out for praise in this particular event. We've heard a lot one of the big Trump campaign themes is supposedly that he has this Avengers-style dream team of new people who are going to come into a second Trump administration and combat the deep state or bring peace and prosperity and justice to America. And I've always found this a bit odd because although people like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard and others promote this kind of fairy tale, Mike Pompeo has always been one of the foremost people in the Trump coalition, the Trump governing coalition. He was one of the few senior-level administration officials in the first Trump administration with whom Trump never had a personal falling out. Trump first appointed Pompeo as CIA director and then elevated him to secretary of state, in which capacity Pompeo served for the majority of the Trump presidency and carried out dutifully their joint policy initiatives.
One of those policy initiatives was to basically declare jihad against Wikileaks, which when Pompeo was CIA director, he called a hostile nonstate intelligence service and then directed the resources of the executive branch to combating and ultimately prosecuting in the form of Julian Assange, who, of course, was indicted in 2019 and then again with a superseding indictment in 2020, he was extracted from the Ecuadorian embassy in London and thrown into Belmarsh Prison, and only a few months ago was he finally released, under the Biden Department of Justice. Assange and his counsel arranged for a plea agreement that enabled him to leave prison and go back to Australia. So, people kind of try to assert that there's some fundamental disparity or incongruence between Trump and Pompeo. Yet Trump has been going around praising Pompeo. He told the radio host Hugh Hewitt recently that Pompeo is among the people who are in consideration for another senior-level role in his forthcoming administration, which would make perfect sense because he and Pompeo were in total harmony, as far as anybody could tell, while Trump was in power the first time. Trump even went on Joe Rogan and favorably name-dropped Pompeo and then now here Pompeo is going around in the Trump entourage, campaigning with him and getting called out by Trump as one of his favored backers. So, I mean, people can have this hallucinatory view of like what Trump might do because are they bought into this whole RFK Jr. mythology where because like RFK Jr. might have some ancillary role at the Food and Drug Administration with like removing toxins from oil supplies that therefore Trump is going to have this new group of like heroic superstars to dismantle the Deep State, Trump himself is telling you who is within his sphere of influence and who is within his orbit. It's Mike Pompeo. If you're a person who views yourself to be an enormous defender of Wikileaks – as I've always been since, I don't know, 2009, 2010 – when they first became prominent in American domestic politics and international affairs as well, then it's just a massive bit of cognitive dissonance to be cheerleading for Donald Trump when he's telling you blatantly that Mike Pompeo is still in his good graces. Mike Pompeo also spoke at the Republican convention. I mean, this is not hidden. It's coming out of Donald Trump's own mouth.
If people want to employ some kind of circuitous reasoning and still claim that it's of urgent moral necessity to reinstate Republican executive power, okay, that's your prerogative, but at least go into it with some clarity as to what you're doing. You know, I didn't vote for either Kamala Harris or Donald Trump – not that anybody should particularly care about my own voting behavior, but I do think it's worthwhile to be at least transparent about what I've done. I've never bought into this whole taboo that certain journalists have where you're supposed to steadfastly conceal your own private political activity or voting behavior. That never made sense to me. And I wrote out a whole explanation of why I did this. This was an interesting thought, that people could look it up if they'd like, it was published over the weekend.
But one thing that I am trying to do is call attention to the legions, the tens of millions of nonvoters who are constantly berated and hectored and lectured and scolded for not voting for one of the two major party candidates. Either they're voting third party or not voting at all, which I think is a perfectly valid position for people who are abstaining from the electoral process because they don't wish to concede that it has any legitimacy in their eyes. And there are so many voters across Pennsylvania. Before I get on to this, I do want to ask the producers to throw up the photo of the woman at the Trump rally who was sitting behind me. She was a Spanish-speaking woman.
And before I get on to my larger point, I just do want to point out that if you go and sit at one of these Trump rallies, I mean, Reading, Pennsylvania, is heavily Latino and there were lots of people who were cheering when Marco Rubio – supposedly one of the former neocons, quote-unquote, who has been banished from the Republican Party under Trump but who is still also within the Trump sphere of influence, just like Tom Cotton, who is also sitting in the VIP section at this rally today, but, you know, I say too much in this regard, I guess, for some people. But I do want to point out, just like the very clear diversity in the demographics that are supporting Trump this time around, I mean, I think it's very much probable, almost even certain that Trump will receive a heavily diversified vote racially, ethnically and religiously tomorrow, probably superseding or exceeding the racial diversity of his vote in 2020 and 2016. And if anything, he might be going down with white voters overall, mostly highly educated white voters. If Trump does lose, it'll probably look something like college-educated white voters trending against him just as happened between 2016 and 2020. And it's not offset sufficiently by the increased level of support from racial minorities that he receives, including that woman who happened to be behind me at the rally. And there were lots of other diverse people at this rally. So, I mean, it cuts right against this fanciful idea that Trump is leading some sort of, quote, “Nazi” movement. I mean, it doesn't seem to include all that much of an appeal to, like racial purification zealotry if you're including within the current iteration of the mock a movement of very visibly diverse set of people.
But anyway, the undecided voter I think is very interesting. I also wrote today an article for Newsweek where I went and surveyed lots of undecided voters in Pennsylvania and people, I think, have a misconception about what the prototypical undecided voter is this late in the election cycle. It's really not a voter who is determined to vote and is still trying to make his or her mind up between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. Those voters do exist. I mean, you would never know it if you look at Internet comment sections all day, but that title does exist.
But more often what you encounter are people who are undecided voters in the sense that they don't know whether it's even worth their time to go vote at all. They tend to have a disenchanted idea of the electoral process as a whole, skeptical toward the two major candidates, they might be more favorable toward one or the other, but the decision point that they've yet to complete in their thought process is whether to even vote at all. And interestingly, a number of these people if they were prodded, if they were maybe targeted by a competent Republican, get-out-the-vote operation – which we're told Elon Musk is funding in Pennsylvania, remains to be seen whether that's going to be effective – but I encountered more often than not among this like basket of voters who are undecided about whether to vote, more often – again, I grant this is anecdotal, but like, what else can I do in terms of conducting reportage than compiling anecdotes? – more often than not, these people who are undecided about whether to vote, they have like a preference for Trump. So, they could be amenable to motivational interventions on the part of some Republican apparatus to try to get them out to vote, to encourage them to be motivated enough to go act on their preference. But so far, they haven't been reached in that way, at least from what I have been able to gather in my sample size. So, it's 25 people and there are a lot of people who reflect this kind of profile.
Yesterday I was out across different parts of most like Philadelphia suburbs, with Meghan O'Rourke, who is a producer here on the System Update show and we were just going to do Man-on-the-Street interviews. Sometimes people can kind of maybe snicker at the utility of conducting this kind of interview, but they're really pretty informative, I find, because you're kind of just doing a random sample of voters. I particularly wanted to see if we could identify nonvoters. People who are abstaining from the election, whether out of pure apathy, out of distaste for the two candidates, or for any other reason because I think that those segments of voters are under-analyzed.
But first, I want to show you a clip of an interview that we did with a person who really reflects why I think more people should do more On-the-Street interviews because you're bound to encounter a voter or a would-be voter who just defies any stereotypical expectation you might have. So, let's go to the interview that we did with the young woman who was a Walmart worker.
Video. Walmart employer. Norristown, PA.
M. Tracey: Yeah. So, what do you think about the election coming up?
Interviewee: I think this election is very important this time. It's a lot going on, so we need a good president, you know? And I think Trump will be a good president, in my opinion, because he's actually done stuff in the office. I haven't really seen the vice president like really do anything, even though being vice president. Yeah. So, I just feel like a guy being a president is better in my opinion.
M. Tracey: Really?
Interviewee: Yes.
M. Tracey: Explain.
Interviewee: I feel like… What's her name?
M. Tracey: Kamala.
Interviewee: I feel like if Kamala was president, I feel like we will be in war with, like, other countries, because she will, like, I don't know. Females are very sensitive.
M. Tracey: Wow. What do you like that Trump did when he was in office the first time?
Interviewee: I can't remember. Okay. I know he did something. Some stuff. Like people said, I don't like Trump, but like, they have to understand, like he did do stuff while he was in office.
I just wanted to play that, not because it's necessarily totally representative of anything in particular, but because you encounter all these amazing anecdotal stories about how people formulate their political views. And as somebody who covers politics for better or worse, day in and day out, you can kind of get into certain patterns or rhythms in terms of how you kind of just assume that the electorate is shaping up. And, you know, we came across a Walmart worker. She was actually 17, okay, but she was working at Walmart, so, she's not eligible to vote this year. But she says her family is all voting for Trump. She wants Trump to win. She has some striking views as to whether a woman should be in office and know she's a young Black woman who's a low-wage worker at Walmart and supporting Trump. So, I just throw that out there to say that there are so many manifestations of the voter that I think you only really encounter if you go out into the wild and just kind of talk to a random selection of people, get off the Internet. Not that the Internet is totally useless, but in terms of, you know, encountering people who are kind of out to defy your expectations as to how people arrive at their political preferences, it's useful to go out and talk to people.
So, I had the bright idea of going to Walmart because I think that's sort of an instructive place to kind of talk to people who may be undecided or less engaged in the political process and yes, let's play that other interview that I did with the second woman at Walmart with her son.
Video. Mother and son at Walmart. Norristown, PA.
M. Tracey: So, you said you have not really been following the election much at all. What do you know? To the extent that you know anything?
Mother: I know that there is Kamala Harris and I know Donald Trump. Yes.
Son: And I know the perfect pick.
Mother: And he knows who he would pick.
M. Tracey: Who would you pick?
Son: Kamala Harris.
M. Tracey: Why is that?
Son: I don't trust Trump. I just don't trust Trump. I never trusted him.
M. Tracey: What don't you like about Trump in particular? Like anything he did when he was president the first time that you didn't like?
Son: No, I don't think I noticed anything yet. (talks to his mother)
Mother: You were young, you were just young.
M. Tracey: How old are you?
Son: Nine.
M. Tracey: Okay. So, at the end of Obama and then Trump came in.
Mother: Yup.
M. Tracey: And what do you like about Kamala, if anything?
Son: I don't know. I just…
M. Tracey: You just like her as an alternative to Trump?
Son: Yes.
M. Tracey (To mother): And you just haven’t been following it.
Mother: I just haven't really been following. I didn't have any problems when Trump was in. I thought he was fine before. But I don't really know who's doing what this year. Like who's, you know, what everybody's talking about. I just really don't keep up.
M. Tracey: Have you voted in the past?
Mother: I have not ever. Never in my life.
M. Tracey: And why? You just don't think that there's enough at stake for you to…
Mother: It's not that, I just... I just never have. I really never have. But if I had to pick one, I would go back to Trump.
M. Tracey: Really?
Mother: Just because he did fine before. Like, I just think I would choose him. That's it.
I played that because she's obviously an infrequent voter – she has never voted – but she's saying that she has a preference for Trump. So, this is like the prototypical, modal voter that the get-out-the-vote operations that are run by both parties would want to identify and then try to urge or motivate to vote and it doesn't seem like that's happened with her. I can give you a bunch of other examples of people who fit a similar profile.
One of my tentative theories here is that there is a fairly sizable untapped pool or voters who could lean Republican. My basic theory is that there does appear in Pennsylvania and other states to be a large, an untapped or seemingly untapped pool of potential Trump or Republican voters who need a bit of extra motivation given their skepticism of the system or their low propensity to vote at all, who could potentially be motivated to vote if they were made contact with by a get-out-the-vote operation. But the Republicans historically have not been as competent at utilizing get-out-the-vote methods as Democrats and so, if Trump does lose Pennsylvania, well, a large share of the reason will be that voters such as this have not been contacted, persuaded or engaged with by these well-funded billionaire-funded groups. So we're told, you know, we're flooding the state with ads, but apparently don't have the wherewithal to identify this type of voter, again, who says that she would prefer Trump but is just not interested enough in the election to go vote.
Okay, so, now we're with Briahna Joy Gray.
Interview: Briahna Joy Gray
M. Tracey: So, Brianna, I wanted to talk to you for a while because obviously we're on, as you may be aware, the eve of the 2024 election, there could be some people out there who are still making up their minds. I would doubt that there are that many watching System Update and Rumble who are undecided, but you never know.
One thing that I've noted, having gone around and surveyed undecided voters here in Pennsylvania, which is ground zero for an endless bombardment of propaganda – it's actually incredible, I mean, I know this happens every election cycle to some extent, especially post-Citizens United, which basically eliminated all constraints on political spending. But it really is incredible to see just how inundated Pennsylvanians are – I've talked to a lot of Pennsylvania voters who are undecided, partially because they're so alienated from all the endless propaganda that they're being bombarded with, that they kind of just are contemplating potentially not even voting out of spite. And I sympathize with that.
So, did you get a chance to look at any of the articles that I sent you? I'm trying to basically postulate a certain type of undecided voter who exists out there in the universe who I think is under-examined and it's not somebody who's like making this a last minute impulsive decision between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. Most people who are determined to vote already have make up their minds. Those are the quintessential undecided voters. The undecided voters that I most encounter here in Pennsylvania and also around the country are people who are disenchanted with the electoral process. And they may have a mild preference for one or the other. Interestingly enough, they tend to express more of a preference for Trump in my experience but they might not be motivated to actually go and bother to vote. They don't think it particularly matters.
Briahna Joy Gray: That doesn't surprise me at all. I mean, we do this every election cycle, right? What is the stat about there being more nonvoters than Americans who identify with either political party, record high numbers of people who identify as independents, right? And that is largely because people start to get to a certain age, it only takes a few election cycles to start to get the sense that no matter who's sitting in the Oval Office, your life is substantively the same. Now, I'm not going to sit here and say that there aren't meaningful differences that come around on a generational basis, that there are meaningful differences in terms of the labor conditions that people have to organize under, or, let's say, Roe (v. Wade) being overturned. But realistically speaking, practically speaking, for most people's lives, the consequences of organizing under Biden's Labor Department being better, it is meaningful, at the same time, fewer than 10% of Americans are in unions, and those numbers have not meaningfully dropped, despite the fact that we have a more pro-labor president in office. And again, that is not to say to diminish those gains. But the fact is, when you have wins that touch the lives, directly touch the lives of so few Americans, you find yourself facing a lot of disaffected voters.
There are policies that have the potential to touch a lot of people in one fell swoop. Remember, Biden's announced student debt policy was going to affect 44 million Americans, 44 million Americans who are going to get $10,000 to $20,000 of their student debt canceled. Remember that. Remember how impactful the $1,200 checks were back in the early days of COVID. There are voters today still, I'm sure you encountered some of them, who will invoke those checks as long ago as they were, as some of the most meaningful interventions from a government they've ever experienced in their life. And yet Democrats have a tendency to, I would argue, purposefully avoid, but even if you're giving them the benefit of the doubt, set up their agenda, their policy, and did that strive more for small incrementalism, instead of the sweeping programs that I think could really win devoted, committed members of the base for many, many cycles going forward. And then the last point on that, I'd say that's Pennsylvania-specific. It's notable that fracking and Kamala Harris's flip-flopping on a fracking ban has been such a point of contention. She's seemingly willing to completely revise her 2019, and 2020 stance. Why? Well, there are only about 17,000 fracking jobs in the entire state of Pennsylvania. In fact, a majority of Pennsylvania voters are supportive of the fracking ban and are deeply concerned about the health implications of having to drink this luminous light-on-fire water that fracking creates. On the other hand, had she wanted to touch again tens of thousands of Pennsylvania voters, she could have focused on the fact that Pennsylvania voters are still operating under a federal minimum wage. That's the federal minimum wage that hasn't been raised since 2009, the longest period in American history since we've had a minimum wage. And then email. There are tens of thousands of minimum wage workers in Pennsylvania who are still on the federal minimum wage rate, you barely hear a peep out of the Democratic Party, about a $15-hour minimum wage, which isn't some far-fetched lefty agenda item. It's a core base item on the Democratic agenda. So, what is really going on here? It feels like many voters are increasingly disaffected because the Democratic Party is pitching their pitch to their donor base who care about things like a fracking ban, the energy companies, the defense contractors, and the like, instead of actually talking to the voters whose votes they need.
M. Tracey: And look at who Kamala Harris is clearly tailoring her message to in the final weeks of her campaign. It's still bizarre to me to even utter this out loud, but it really is centered on Liz Cheney and disaffected, highly engaged, news-attentive Republicans who Kamala Harris apparently wagers that she'll be able to convince to come and vote for the Democrat. I don't know for sure that that is an impossibly crazy strategy. It certainly didn't work in 2016 for Hillary Clinton when she employed a version of it but you could argue perhaps that it might have worked to some extent for Biden in 2020. It's hard to say. I mean, Biden did largely win in the contested states because of major shifts within affluent suburbs, whereas the city centers like Philadelphia or Detroit or Milwaukee, actually trended marginally toward Trump. But that was offset by the major gains that the Democrats made in these affluent suburbs, which are increasingly, increasingly at the forefront of their electoral coalition.
So, there's been a ton of energy expended on this show and other shows in the so-called alternative media ecosystem in dismantling the Democrats. And I'm always all for that. Okay? I can never get enough of it and I support Trump's principles but I do want to talk about Donald Trump, because one thing that's so maddening to me about this election cycle – and I spelled out in the other article that I wrote about my non-votes in the 2024 election – is that I consider myself, to some extent, a part of alternative media. I think it's a necessary corrective and has been a necessary corrective to the propagation of mainstream narratives and opening opportunities for people who might not have a traditional route to conduct journalism or engage in the media but I'm sorry to say – and people are going to get angry at me for saying this, who are watching – but a lot of alternative media this cycle has basically just been converted into a Republican cheerleading squad. I mean, Donald Trump can hand-pick “whatever podcaster, bro guy” – and I don't even say that derogatorily, I watch some of these podcasts – who he can go and banter with for an hour and a half and they won't ask him a single challenging question. And the list goes on. I mean, there are people who, you know, I would have had a much more respectable opinion a year or two ago who decided that their proper role in the 2024 election was basically just to join the Trump bandwagon. And if you want to vote for Trump, okay, fine but let's actually do some serious critique of his record, of his policy positions and it's just been virtually missing in these alternative media spheres, as far as I could tell.
I don't know if you watch any of my introduction, but I happen to be at one of the final Trump rallies today in Reading, Pennsylvania. He pointed to Mike Pompeo, who was there in the Trump entourage, camped out on the campaign trail with Trump today, said what a great guy he is. He said on multiple occasions that Mike Pompeo was one of the people who is in consideration for another senior-level administration position. And for all we want to, you know, bemoan the Democrats relying on Dick and Liz Cheney, what's the substantive difference, really, between Trump parading around with Mike Pompeo?
Tom Cotton was also there, one of the most virulent hawks in the entire Senate. Marco Rubio was in the entourage today. Lindsey Graham is a top surrogate. None of these people have been cast out of the so-called RFK Jr. reformed MAGA Republican Party or MAGA Party. I just think that there's such a torrent of confusion around this and a lack of serious critical examination that I sort of sometimes worry that the overwhelming focus that I have often partaken in, in criticizing and scrutinizing the Democrats has given way to the Trump and the Republicans, at least in these alternative media circles, kind of give being given a free pass. And there's just a flood of propaganda being repeated that is flattering to them without actually examining the record or what they would do a second time. So, am I crazy here?
