Hey, hey, welcome to Raging Moderates. I'm Scott Galloway.
We are live and will be live all of next week, Monday through Friday, as the results trickle in. Make sure to subscribe to stay up to date and support the show. We'll be taking your questions at the end of the show, so drop them in the chat as we go. Okay, let's bust into it. With just five days until Election Day, more than 39 million Americans have already cast their ballot. This is now officially the most expensive midterm election cycle ever, with spending surpassing even past presidential election years. That's staggering.
Staggering and sickening.
So, so here are the races we're watching. Let's start with Trump's latest campaign stops. She was in Ohio yesterday and heads to South Carolina today, where Republican Darlene Graham is in a virtual tie with Democrat Annie Andrews in the race for Senate. According to the latest New York Times/Siena poll this morning, Fox News moved the race from lean Republican to toss-up. What are your thoughts on this race, Jess?
Yeah, it's definitely a race. It's a big deal that Fox moved it into the toss-up category. Republicans know it to be true as well. That's why they're spending there, and Trump is having to go back. This overwhelming feeling that it's one thing for Darlene Graham to step in to finish out Lindsey Graham's term. It's quite another to get a whole new term. Without having the qualifications, it's over 50% don't think that she's qualified for the job. 54% think that Annie Andrews is. And Andrews is cleaning up with independent voters, who are very much telling the story of this election. I'm excited about it now. I think that it's a real opportunity. People looking at South Carolina and Kansas and Mississippi, to a large degree, and saying like, is this for once not just lighting my money on fire? I'm curious what you think because you know Kansas has had Democratic governors but not a senator since 1932. What do you think is the difference there? Is it like the management job, like an executive job versus a legislator job, or the like sending you to Washington versus keeping you here? Because that disconnect doesn't make an enormous amount of sense to me.
I'm not sure I understand the question.
Oh, sorry. So Kansas elects Democratic governors but doesn't elect Democratic senators.
And I mean, I assume that it's about the management, you know, executive element of the job, but not having a Democratic senator from Kansas since 1932 feels like an enormous trend to be breaking.
It feels like it's their values versus, I guess, the Democrats have been good at putting up the Democrats. I would imagine that be when governorships in red states tend to be more moderate, like a basher.
And that they say, 'Okay, maybe in terms of operations, we want someone who's more operationally minded and level-headed as opposed to an ideologue. Let's send them to Washington to try and, you know, turn back Roe v. Wade.'
What's interesting? Well, first off, just to return to the spending because that is, I find that just staggering. Yeah, the Senate, which might be more consequential than the presidential race, has spent $3.2 billion, nearly matching the entire 2024 presidential race spend. And this is being fought like a national election because functionally control of the Senate is as consequential as the presidency for the next two years of governance. And when you have a cycle where the spending or the outsp—when you have a Senate cycle that's outspending the last presidential cycle, it's lit—it's not even the dog wagging the tail here. It's the tail is wagging the dog so hard it's creating its own weather system. I mean, this is just people don't realize how much money. And then going to South Carolina, Fritz Hollings left office in 2005. He was the last Democrat South Carolina sent to the Senate. A toss-up rating now means the Senate's 21-year streak is generally at risk, which is kind of a bigger structural shift than any specific candidate. I mean, a blue wave in concert with who I think is an incompetent candidate. To me, it feels like the possibility for a one-term Senate. I forget the guy in Arkansas or whatever that, you know, was up against basically a pedophile and won for one, you know, for those two years. I forget who that was. Was that—
But yeah, this is—that would be, I think that would be an earthquake. I just can't—the fact that South Carolina... Do you really... What's your call? Do you really think the Democrats are going to take that seat in South Carolina?
I still think of my 'Oh my god, is this really going to happen?' It's still Texas for me, just because I think the Ted Cruz campaign has, you know, put in the work for so long, and there are so many tea leaves, including the turnout, the early turnout there, that indicate that there will be an enormous structural advantage for Democrats on Election Day, unless President Trump, who is out there again saying, you know, 'vote like I'm on the ballot,' is able to get everybody off the couch. But in a lot of ways, and obviously it's good politics to do this, the Ted Cruz campaign has been saving the best ads for last. And he had one that went up last night with three former Republican office holders, one judge, someone, and then two from the legislature, set to this incredible music also that made me feel like I was in a movie, essentially, you know, in the Wild West. And I thought, yeah, there are always these figures, right? This kind of never-Trumpish cabal or the Republicans that find their spine for one particular election or moment. But this feels like it has been a steady drip of people like this who are saying because it's Ken Paxton, I don't think it would be the same if it were John Cornyn. And I think it would be a lot harder for him to be able to be, you know, tied or ahead in this race, but that it's just not acceptable to me. So, in the miracle scenario of winning red states, I still think that Texas is more feasible than South Carolina. But I'm very excited about this, and I, you know, Dr. Annie Andrews is very much the real deal, and she has run as close to a nonpartisan campaign as you could hope one would. It's not quite Rob Sand in Iowa, who I think is the king of the nonpartisan campaign. But Annie Andrews has taken on all the culture war stuff, had, you know, right on just saying, 'Nope, I don't think that. Stop saying that. I think that. I'm going to go direct to camera and tell you that I don't.' And she's finding common cause with a lot of people. And I think that expertise might be back in fashion, right? Like actually having a doctor and not one like a Roger Marshall that chases people for $101 and throws them in jail.
Could be good.
So, let's move to Ohio where Ramaswamy's ad backfired in the race for governor. Kelsey now has Democrat Amy Acton with a 78% chance of winning. I'm shocked it's not higher. I feel like this race is over. What are your thoughts?
I mean, 78 is like in a red state. What do you want? Yeah. I mean, also, I mean, it's a batting average, so it doesn't have feelings in the same way, but like we did see a lot of like 95, 99% chance that Hillary wins, and like everything can go right in the other direction, and these are still fundamentally red states. The ad, super, super bad. Doubling down on it, then tripling down on it. Very, very bad. Even when, you know, the sitting governor said like, 'Take it down.' John Husted, who's running for Senate or to keep his seat against Sherrod Brown, who's trying to come back, said like, 'I wouldn't have done that ad.' But then on top of it, he just sucks. Like he's utterly charmless and he—yeah. And he's—the way that they're talking now, they're trying to make this into like a racist culture war race more than anything. And I'm not sure that that's really how to win a cost-of-living election when people are down on you. You know, it's like the last-ditch grab for the xenophobia and the trans stuff, and it doesn't seem to be flying. But he was always a bad candidate for it. I'm more interested in what happens to Sherrod Brown, which I'm excited about because I've always loved him.
Well, let's go. Let's head down to Georgia now, where Obama once again got under Trump's skin when campaigning for Senator John Ossoff and gubernatorial candidate Keisha Lance Bottoms, who has been dramatically outspent by Republican Rick Jackson. A Bottoms victory would make her the first female Black governor. Black voters are also turning out early, accounting for 36% of ballots cast in Georgia. Any thoughts on what's happening in Georgia, Jess?
John Ossoff is doing all the right things. The Obama rally was great. I don't know if we have any clips from it ready to go, but he, you know, Obama touched on the substantive stuff, but also was rehashing the Cheesecake Factory issue, pointing out that they didn't care about the Saddam Hussein comparison. But also talking about how the White House was willing to develop, you know, a White House-wide response to this, and that Trump called, you know, Scott Bessent, who's supposed to be dealing with the economy, and like, you know, come out there and talk about cheeseburger rolls or whatever, and how in Obama's time, if he had called Tim Geithner when they were trying to recover from the financial crash, I mean, been like, 'Can you get out here to Arby's and talk about how much you love roast beef?' And I know that I'm Obama-pilled and it's very elder millennial of me, but there is a fluency and a fluidity to the way that he does politics. And this arena was enormous. It had over 10,000 people in it. And it was like Mick Jagger, right, is out there. And Ossoff has that energy too, man. It's got that Camelot vibe. Yeah.
It feels like when Obama's campaigning for Ossoff, he's not campaigning for Ossoff. He's running a branding ad that creates cloud cover for Democrats in all 50 states. I think of this as branding, not even his campaigning. As Ossoff doesn't need any help, it'll raise a ton of money for him, which Ossoff can then kind of become. You know, one of the ways I think you start curing a run or charting a path for eventual presidential run is you just start racking up favors with the party elites. And the best way to do that is to give them money in close elections, right? And Ossoff has got to have a war chest of money he can start doing out to friends and family across different races. And makes an enormous difference for Keisha Lance Bottoms. Rick Jackson is a billionaire. He can spend a lot of his own money on top of it. He isn't an election denier, but he's also more of a normie Republican than a lot of the Trump era ones. He feels like a Georgia Republican, right?
Yeah, like a Brian Kemp-ish. I mean, it comes from a different world, but he's not freaking people out in the same way that some of these other candidates are. And Kemp didn't endorse Jackson in the primary, but is now very supportive of his candidacy. So, Keisha Lance Bottoms definitely needs the teflon-ness of John Ossoff at this point.
In Alaska, where Trump's accusing Democrats of perjury in the Senate race, polling continues to favor Mary Peltola over Dan Sullivan. I want to talk to you about this—the ballot-stacking situation. Are you—you're following this, the big New York Times piece about the extra Dan Sullivan being recruited by Democrats? I finally feel like we're being smart, that we're going—that we're doing what Republicans have been doing forever. I don't—and the end state is, I think that whoever wins gets seated. I don't see that this is going to be cause for anything resembling—I mean, the courts generally don't like to overturn elections. What are your thoughts here?
So I don't like it. I accept that this is something that happens. This actually happened in a race involving Mary Peltola, that the Republican Party in Alaska backed this other guy, Eric Hafner, who was actually an inmate in a New York prison who ran for Alaska's sole House seat against Peltola. So she has some experience with this. And it has happened other places in the country. There's a case in Miami where the Democrat ended up losing by just 32 votes, and the Republican operative got convicted and the Republican kept the seat. So it's not even like it was overturned and, you know, or even rerun. One of the more egregious examples, I think, actually is from Pennsylvania, where Summer Lee, the Democrat, was running, and the Republicans recruited a guy with the same name as the retiring 30-year incumbent who was actually a Democrat. So it looked to people like their congressman of three decades was still on the ballot. And Summer Lee ended up being able to win that race. So I'm certainly not interested in being lectured about, you know, how dirty we are, but I didn't like it. And it—and it's not illegal. It looks like apparently there's more to this story, and, you know, the campaign aide who gave the story then tried to retract it. You know, rumors about if there was money involved and, you know, getting paid off, like that could be illegal. But if something's going to change, everybody's got to lay down their proverbial swords, and I don't see that happening. But I don't—I don't feel great about it, and I didn't have the five yesterday, and I don't have it today. I'm sure we will still be talking about it tomorrow, but I was very defensive and said on Monday when it did come up and said like the Trump DOJ doesn't want to compete and they're already crying foul and they're not going to accept election results and they think that their voters are too stupid, which I stand by because on the ballot it does say, you know, Dan Sullivan Republican incumbent versus the Dan Sullivan with no, you know, no title next to it. But it's a dirty trick, right? It's a dirty trick that has been done before. But it makes me feel icky.
So I have some personal experience with this. This is a true story. In my senior year, I ran for student body president of University High School. We were called the Warriors then. Now, I think we're called the Trees or something. And I ran against a guy named Scott Geral. So it was Scott Galloway versus Scott Geral, and I'm convinced the only reason I lost is because people thought he was me. So I have experience with this type of voter ballot manipulation. We also looked like each other, and we were also friends, which made things really—
Where's Scott Carroll today? Does he also have a bunch of podcasts?
I have no idea where Scott is. I think he—I know he went to—Where—Where is Scott? Where are you? What are you doing? I think he went to work for—Are you on the live stream? Yeah, I think he went to work for Interactive Core, IIC, for a while. He went—where did he go to school? He went to Cal. Nice kid. Anyways, he and I immediately bonded. We were both being raised by a single mother. But again, I lost in a tight election. So I have some—after losing 10th grade president, 11th grade president, 12th grade great president, but we won't go into that. All right, so back to the important election.
A boring side note about this, though.
Not Scott Carroll-related, but it does matter a lot less in a ranked-choice voting system. Just like putting that out into the ether again, still feel icky about it. Again, they did it. They do it, and would do it, and wouldn't be sitting here opining about how guilty they—bitching about it. Yeah.
Yeah. All right, I'm done. I'm—There you go.
So, CNN's latest polling has Democrats leading in four key Senate races by six points in Texas, up seven in Michigan, plus four in Kansas, and four in Maine. Friend of the pod, Larry Sabato's Crystal Ball has shifted 21 races toward Democrats, including key Senate races in Florida, North Carolina, and South Carolina. Let's take a look at what we missed on the campaign trail yesterday.
And in six days, Georgia will rebuke the crook President Donald Trump with such clarity and power that no president will dare such abuses again for centuries.
The way it is, I'm a very high IQ person. I passed three cognitive tests. I'm the only president that agreed to take them anymore. Obama couldn't have passed them.
They don't have solutions to actual problems, so they'd rather have the media and you talking about the Cheesecake Factory. Just keep throwing distractions out there and hope that you won't notice that your bills are higher and your life is tougher. We named a lovely lake named like Lake Ontario.
And no wannabe dictator and his billionaire sidekick will stop the momentum that we are seeing across this state.
You know, I owned the Miss Universe contest long ago. I decided I had to sell it when I became a politician. Owning the Miss Universe was not good when you're being president.
We got to keep reality TV on Bravo. Leave it to the professionals. We don't need it in the White House.
Okay. All right. Let's just let that rest on its own merits there. We have to talk about Michigan. Jess, Abdul El-Sayed is facing lingering divisions within his own party. His former primary rival, Representative Haley Stevens, is still endorsing him, but hasn't campaigned with him as tensions over Israel and anti-Semitism threatened to alienate key voters. Stevens' fiance, Jason Turkish, has said he will vote for Rogers. Here he is, and then we'll hear Haley Stevens' response.
I waited and I watched and I listened for Abdul to moderate, but he didn't moderate. He escalated. He got worse and worse and worse as this general election campaign has gone on. Rather than bringing people together, he's just driven them further and further apart. You know, I watch him in recent weeks as he has become verbally combative with any reporter who has the gall, as he sees it, the gall to ask him about Hamas, and is 100% disqualifying to be a United States senator. I have waited week after week, day after day for him to disavow this hate without equivocation. He won't do it.
