Raging Moderates — Tight Polls, North Carolina Governor’s Scandal, and Millionaires Are Renting Homes

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1:33Welcome to Raging Moderates. I'm Scott Galloway. And I'm Jessica Tarlov. Jess, what's going on at The Five? What's going on there? Well, a lot is going on, but what was not going on with me on Friday was I was supposed to be on the five and I couldn't go in because I had such a bad allergic reaction to something that half of my lip swelled up. Do you remember the movie Hitch with Will Smith where he did the Cyrano de Bergerac like feeding guys good lines to get girls thing? I feel like such an elder millennial. That's like 20 years ago. Anyway, his face explodes. No, don't tell me in case. Well, I think maybe a lip balm that I used that had papaya in it.

2:13It's unclear. I'm on steroids, which is the greatest invention. Maybe I guess penicillin is better, but steroids are really good. But anyway, I sent a picture of my face at 630 in the morning to the producer who wrote back, like, we will not be seeing you today. But besides that, on The Five, you know, we talked about Mark Robinson a lot. I know we're going to talk about that later. in the episode. What's happening generally, though, with a show like that as a run-up to election? Is it just like a ratings bonanza and people are all over it? Is this kind of your sweet... Is this the playoffs for you guys?

2:45It is definitely the playoffs. The ratings still hang around 3 million. We have a very tried and true audience, but we saw Big Spike, Greg Gutfeld, co-host on The Five, had Trump on his show, Gutfeld exclamation point, for the whole hour. And I think that got like five million viewers. So people are definitely flocking in for election coverage. Talk about the interview. What was the least crazy and the craziest things he said? Honestly, it was very low on the insanity. I think because he was calm. He was amongst people who like him. and what was really great for the audience. So Greg's show, nighttime show, is in front of a live audience and they didn't know that Trump was the guest.

3:31So they showed up for a regular episode and thought maybe they'd see Brian Kilmeade who hosts Fox and Friends and they got an hour of Donald Trump. She's somehow a woman. Somehow she's doing better than he did. But I can't imagine it can last. And he talked about everything from all the old shows that he used to do, like going on Johnny Carson and Howard Stern to some stuff about the campaign. And of course, there were things that I would have fact checked. But he was at his most charming, I would say. And part of that was driven by a very good friend who's on the show, Kat Timph, who's a libertarian.

4:11I think Kat's actually come on your Prof G podcast before when she had a book coming out a year ago. She has a new book even. She's prolific. but Kat is not naturally partial to Trump. She doesn't love his policies. And he was really clearly focused on getting her to like him and to be comfortable with him. And I saw a little bit of a different side of him. Did it work or was it creepy? Well, she's pregnant. So everything like could look a little bit creepier. You know how weird men are around pregnant women. But he was on the other side of the set. So it wasn't creepy like that. But you're just acutely aware of everything when you're, you know, 30 pounds heavier and with child.

4:55What I've told. I didn't find it creepy. I thought it was. What I've told my boys is that unless you see the head crowning, never reference a woman's pregnancy. Do not mention it. And also watching the head crown is also frightening in another way. But that's a whole other episode. All right. Let's go on to something more cheery. Let's talk about the latest polls, a bombshell in the North Carolina governor's race and a surprising trend. millionaires opting to rent instead of buy. We're six weeks from Election Day, and the polls are starting to pile up. Over the weekend, we got an NBC News poll that showed Harris leading Trump 49 to 44 percent within the margin of error.

5:30So I don't know. At this point, it feels like the polls are, I don't want to say superfluous, but yeah, who knows? Coin flip, though Trump leads on the economy, inflation, and the border. Then on Monday, new numbers from the New York Times-Siena College Bowl shows that Donald Trump is doing well across the Sun Belt. The tightest race is in North Carolina, where Trump leads Harris 49 to 47. Georgia and Arizona show a slightly wider lead for Trump. What's your take on these numbers, Jessica? You're a pollster. You get this stuff. What can we take from this? Well, I saw a very funny tweet that said, like, all data people are just going to have to figure out how to say the same thing differently for the next six weeks, which is like, this is a tied race with a slight advantage today in this direction.

6:13And like, Let me figure out some forces underneath an undercurrent would probably be a better word for it. That'll make me have an interesting TV hit. So that's what I'm going to try to do with this. We should note with the NBC poll what is special about it. And a five-point lead is a big deal. But the last time that they had a national poll, Biden was still the candidate. And it was Trump plus two. So just as an encapsulation of how different this race is, something that I was paying attention to is obviously what's going on in the swing states, but they had the question of who represents change, and Harris is up nine points on Trump with that.

6:58And that's something that people say really matters and has been a question in all of this. Like, how do you become a change agent if you are the sitting vice president? And her highest tested statement from the debate was when she said, I'm not Joe Biden. And clearly people are feeling that. And they're saying, I know what Trump is like. I know what Biden is like. This is a new person. And then she also was 20 points up on who has the better mental and physical capability. So basically by moving Biden out of the way, now everyone is actually paying attention to what Donald Trump is actually like.

7:36and they're not loving what they're seeing. Other big things like the lead on the economy has gone down a ton. He was over 20 points ahead. It's now nine points in the CBS poll. He's only up six points on the economy. So for all of this talk of Kamala Harris isn't really telling people anything, she's not answering questions, and no one knows what she stands for, the results seem to indicate that people do know what she stands for. They know enough to say that she would be within six to ten points of Donald Trump on who's best to manage the economy, which means they probably heard something. I don't know.

8:14What do you think about the results or say something fancy about a tide rate? Yeah. It's really striking to me that there's such a thing as an undecided voter. I think there are few things you could label yourself that out you as more of a village idiot than at this point being an undecided. Let me get this. You're like, it's a toss up for you. You can't quite figure out. I think anyone who says they're an undecided voter at this point is a closeted Trumper and is pretending to be thoughtful. I just don't – it's for me at this point and I don't – you're the – you know more about politics than I do.

8:52At this point, it's all about turnout. I just don't buy that anyone's undecided that isn't a village fucking idiot looking for someone to interview them with a mic in front of them as an undecided. How could you be undecided at this point? And also this criticism that she hasn't done an interview and we don't know her policies. She was a senator. She was an attorney general. She was the vice president. You know that basically she's center left. She's more conservative on law and order and economics issues than most people give her credit for. On Israel and Gaza, I think people are probably a little less clear on where she stands.

9:30But you're clear on where Trump stands. Okay, you can be clear that he doesn't mind if a woman's bodily autonomy is taken away from her. But he was for TikTok or against it until he was for it. He was against tariffs until he was for them. I have a huge cohort of friends, and I don't want to say respect it, but I understand it. They just think government is ineffective, and they just go in and vote for whoever they think is going to put more money in their pockets in the short run, and they think that's going to be Donald Trump. So they go in, they listen to everybody rage about Donald Trump, and then they say, hold my beer, and they go behind a curtain and they vote for Trump.

10:05But I'm just trying to figure out, do you really think – well, let me put this forward as a thesis. Where her money will come in right now is the get out the vote part that's going to take place over the next eight weeks or whatever it is. That's where the money is going to kick in, I hope. But at this point, it's not about undecided voters. It's about turning out the vote. Your thoughts? Two-parted response. One requires you to have watched Bill Maher from Friday. I'm not sure if you did. Oh, you did. So you just described Brett Stevens. For the last two weeks, I've been going on and on. Like, I can't figure out where undecided voters, where informed undecided voters are.

10:43I'm like, who's the person who has a list on their refrigerator of like, well, she said this and he's like, who is this person? And then I opened The New York Times three days ago and it's you. Stephanie Ruhle says, I try to figure out who this person is. And here you are sitting next to me with a microphone in front of your face, right on one of the most salient political chat shows that's in business right now telling us you're definitely not for Trump, but you just don't get calm. Yeah, you can't vote for Trump, but you need to know her policies. I'm like, OK, what does that mean, boss? But it's also for a lot of these people who are highly educated and certainly capable of reading a website, all the policies are there.

11:23If you harbor a fear that she is secretly going to ban fracking on day 112 when there's no evidence of that, certainly from how the Biden-Harris administration conducted itself, or that she secretly hates Jews even though she's married to one who talks about it constantly. or that she's going to fund transgender surgeries for undocumented people who are in prison, as per the ACLU survey that she signed in 2019. Like, I can't help you. But I don't think that's who Brett Stevens is. And I have someone very close to me, my mentor, you know, has a very big successful job in finance, and he's not going to vote for Donald Trump, but every day sending me things.

12:13Why won't she answer this? I need to know this. I need to know that. And some of it is just like Stephanie Ruhl was saying it, like tough noogies. You're not going to get it exactly the way that you want it. And that doesn't mean that she shouldn't do more. And it seems like they really are ramping up and that they needed that first four to six weeks when she didn't expect to be the candidate. You know, that really flies in the face of this whole grand coup plan. You know, Kamala Harris woke up that Sunday and was like, holy shit, you know, I could end up being president of the United States of America on November 5th instead of the vice president.

12:49But the discrepancy in standards to which these two candidates are being held kills me. And I find that I spend most of my time when you say, like, what's going on on the five? That's what's going on on the five, that I'm saying over and over, she did this, she said this, you're ignoring this. And I get it. People are partisans. And I, you know, Trump has done some things that I probably haven't given him full due for. Like the Abraham Accords. Yeah. It's pretty awesome. Huge, huge accomplishment. And I was not as generous about it as I should have been because I don't like Donald Trump. And he got China right.

13:26That's the other thing I would say. I think he early recognized the asymmetry and trade between us and China. I would give him credit for that. But did he fix it? Well, he's the first to kind of call them out. He announced the TikTok ban and then unannounced it. But he did put in place tariffs that the Biden administration has kept in place. Look, you're going to get some shit right. And he doesn't get credit for any of it. She won't get credit for anything she does for her critics. The thing that I find these folks saying they need more information, I would argue they're Trumpers and they're going to vote for Trump.

14:01I just don't. And anyone saying that, in my view, is either a closeted Trump voter and they want to pretend there's a legitimate reason not to vote for her, or it's referred anger. And it's anger around, and I have a little bit of this, she was coronated. There wasn't a competition. And she still sort of, in some ways, engages to compete in terms of going out and really meeting with a ton of reporters and doing a bunch of interviews. Having said that, it's a little bit unfair to levy this this indictment or this accusation that she won't let her policies she won't she won't come out when she's the one who is challenging him to another debate.

14:42And he won't he won't show up for that. Yeah, I just I don't believe that they're all closeted Trumpers. I think that your anger thesis is probably more what's going on here, that people are pissed off about the process, that frankly, they're angry that Biden continued on. Like if he had dropped out a year earlier and we had a mini primary and everyone saw essentially what was on display at the DNC, all of this talent, right? Like they saw Gretchen Whitmer and Wes Moore and Pete Buttigieg and Gavin Newsom and Kamala Harris and whoever else was going to throw their hat in the ring and Josh Shapiro, of course.

15:28then we might have a in their mind had a stronger candidate if they don't think kamala would have emerged from that i actually think there's a pretty decent likelihood that she could have come out the victor of a mini primary but they we got to a point where there was just not enough time to do it and i think you know when politicians say something that just circumvents the truth and it it feels to you and and we're not politicians trying to hang on to our seats or anything like that. But it feels like one of those moments where you just say, just tell me the honest thing. It really wouldn't bother me.

16:00Like, stop saying there was an open competition. No one else threw their hat in the ring. There wasn't an open competition. I happen to be fine with it and perfectly comfortable with what happened because I do think Kamala was on the ticket. And so the people were saying, I'm voting for an 81-year-old guy who is unlikely to finish his term anyway, so I have to be comfortable with the Kamala Harris presidency. But like, when Pelosi says, you know, anyone could have thrown their hat in. Obviously not. I'm not saying that you called them up and said, don't you dare, but you weren't welcoming it. We'll be right back.

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17:58I have something that's not in the script I would just love to get your reactions to because we were so busy at Pivot, we didn't bring it up, which was actually kind of convenient given that it's a Vox property. But I'm curious to get your thoughts, if any, on a story that's kind of come and gone around Olivia Nuzzi and RFK Jr. And this quote unquote digital relationship. I don't even know how to describe it, but I had a lot of thoughts about it. And I tweeted about it or I threaded about it. And I got some what I thought was really intelligent pushback. But I'm curious what you think of the whole situation.

18:29Well, what we know so far is that Olivia Nuzzi, who is a 31-year-old star campaign reporter at New York Magazine, had written about RFK Jr., gotten to know him. She covered the presidential race for New York Magazine, right? In general, yes, but she had done a piece on him. And she had also written what is widely regarded as the most consequential piece in nailing, putting the final nail in Biden's coffin, basically saying that every Democrat in Washington thinks he can't do this. And it's not just voters that are uneasy, but there's this whisper campaign. and, you know, Biden should be exiting stage left.

19:11And I think that came out July 4th, right? Or July 5th, something like that. And now that it has been revealed that she was having a digital affair, which is rumored to include racy photos, very demure of her that she was sending today. The word digital freaked me out. I'm like, does that mean she sticks her finger up his ass during sex? Like, I didn't know what digital meant. So it's sexting and photos? What does it mean? It's on your device. On your device, okay. As far as we know, which is different for RFK Jr., who usually engages in the actual digital. Yeah, goes analog. What was it, 37 times that he cheated on his wife that he detailed in that horrific diary that eventually led to her killing herself?

19:56She referenced it in her suicide note. Yeah, but he said she took it back. You didn't hear that part? She wasn't mad at all. I'm very, very happy with how things turned out. So what's the backstory or part of the backstory that's also interesting to this, at least from the gossip standpoint, is that Olivia Nuzzi was engaged to Ryan Lizza, who is also a D.C. politics reporter. He writes playbook now for Politico, and he left his wife for Nuzzi 20 years his junior. And so there was a lot of, you know, online the karma of you leave your wife for someone 20 years younger than she. Leaves you for a 70-year-old?

20:39Leaves you for someone 40 years older than you. Yes, a 70-year-old Kennedy who has a brain worm. And, you know, it's just not your average Kennedy bear. But journalists - That was good. I just want to highlight that was good. I'm sorry. Go ahead. Thank you. It doesn't feel ethically sound that she continued to cover the campaign like this. And the story that's coming out of RFK Jr.'s camp doesn't seem fully believable that she basically stalked him and he wasn't interested because this guy is a dog. And he's been interested in everybody that's been interested in him over the years. but people are really, they're all over the place on this.

21:23You know, people defending her, saying, you know, we all make mistakes too. Like, are you effing kidding me that you went on and continued to cover this race? But I want to hear what you threaded and what the thoughtful responses were. So when I first saw this, I think I was a little bit triggered because the Clintons were sort of my heroes. And as I learned more about what went down with Monica Lewinsky, I just felt, I literally felt they didn't ruin her life because she has a nice life. I've become sort of like Twitter friendly with her. But they basically, it felt like such an abuse of power from him and then them collectively kind of indicting her and disparaging.

22:06I just, it just broke my heart the way they treated her. and this woman, Kara Swisher, actually did this fantastic interview with her. And she said, what would your life have been like imagine had this not happened to you? And she said, well, it was obviously a very impressive young woman. I wanted to go get a PhD by this point. I thought I would have been married, maybe a couple of kids, maybe working in policy. And you just feel you're heartbreaking because can you imagine dating? Can you imagine getting a job when you're Monica Lewinsky in your 20s and 30s? And so I was a little bit triggered by this story because if you pulled up, If you typed in RFK that morning, there were 10 stories come up with 10 buttons or the pictures, whatever you call it.

22:46And eight of them were a picture of her. One was a picture of her and him. And the 10th was of her former fiance. And I thought, okay, if it had come out that Vice President Harris or Secretary Clinton were having a quote-unquote digital affair with a guy, it wouldn't be pictures of the guy. I thought the reflexive, the automatic reflexive reaction of media is to slut shame. And this was an easy one from her standpoint. She should be fired. An ethical lapse in journalism, you're not supposed to have any sort of relationship like that with people you're covering on something as important as presidential politics.

23:25You sit her down and say, you fucked up, you're fired. And people are fired for a lot less. she's trying to maintain a career as a top-level journalist. I think she's so talented that she'll recover from it and probably move on. I don't think this is anything like the drama of Lewinsky-Clinton scandal. But he, at the age of 70, is trying to convince us that he should get the nuclear codes. And yet the story wasn't at all about him. And now he is framing, I can see what their campaign's doing. They're trying to frame her as like a Glenn Close, Boiled the Rabbit that person that was so drawn to him because his charms.

24:00And so I came out and said, this story really shouldn't be about her. It should be about him. And Julie Hyman, who's a great reporter at Yahoo, I actually met her at Bloomberg. And I don't think I'm speaking out of school because I think she was right, wrote me and said, Scott, this is about, you know, journalistic ethics. And you're not giving, you're taking away her agency, just portraying her as this foey little Dawn, you know, this foe-y little or doughy little foe. They can't resist the charms of an older Kennedy. So I, but I found the media's reaction really interesting that they were very focused on her.

24:36And maybe that's because they like, okay, this guy, you know, this guy's a weirdo. So we don't, we expect this from him, but I didn't, I found it really weird that the media immediately went to, this was her fault and the story was all about her. It felt like slut-shaming to me. It felt like none of the lessons of the Me Too era were being remembered at all. Like, when people in positions of power take advantage of them and there is an imbalance, there's an age imbalance, there's a power imbalance. Like, RFK Jr. has been through worse than getting some bad press, right? Like that's the worst that Olivia Nuzzi could do to him.

25:19And you can't get worse than dumping a dead bear cub in Central Park or the whale that he hacked the head off of that he's being charged like 37 grand for letting the blood and guts leak on his kids or whatever he was doing in that station wagon. So I did find that to be absent in it. And I said to my husband that it it bothers me about myself that I don't know definitively how I feel about this. I know that there was a breach in ethics, and I know that that matters a lot. Like, I get paranoid when I even say something on air and don't disclose that I know the person, right, or have, you know, come across the person at a party or whatever it is, let alone I'm going to go out and write, like I was saying, the seminal piece about Biden's fitness for office when I'm sending photos of myself to a guy who also wants that job.