Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news. This is Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Messer and Tim Stenebeck on Bloomberg Radio Well. Earlier today, President Joe Biden expressed hope that Americans can quote lower the temperature and reaffirm their faith in the election system after a contentious campaign that saw Republican President
elect Donald Trump secure a sweeping victory. The former president did say that campaigns are a contest of competing visions or the current president I should say, a country chooses one or the other. He said, we accept the choice the country made. And he said many times, as he said many times, you can't love your country only when
you win. Well, it will take some time for the history books to write the story of this presidential election, but Bloomberg BusinessWeek editor Bradstone offers an assessment today of what propelled Donald Trump to a decisive victory. Brad is a Bloomberg BusinessWeek editor. He's also the author of four books, including New York Times bestseller Amazon un Bound, Jeff Based and the Invention of a Global Empire. He joins us
from our San Francisco bureau. Brad, you write that Trump's decisive twenty twenty four win against Kamala Harris looks less like the polished narrative Gemstone it will inevitably become and more like an unwieldy clump of muddy economic explanations and gross political blind spots. What are the muddy economic explanations? I want to start there?
Yeah, thanks Tim Oh And first of all, great interview with Kathy Wood. I think you very interesting stuff. Well, look, you know, we always look back on our elections and sort of contemplate a pithy summation of what happened. So Trump in twenty sixteen kind of bringing Americans to reject
Obama's globalist optimism. You know, you can go back Obama his message of hope after the Great Recession, and so I was really kind of thinking about, well, what are we going to take from this, And the most obvious explanation, the big one that stands out, is that people were just just dissatisfied with the current state of things economically. I mean, you had a president deep underwater and Biden
his popularity is approval rating at forty one percent. Twenty six percent of Americans dissatisfied with the direction of the company. That's the easiest and most obvious explanation. But when I talk about the kind of muddy factors, I mean, there's just so much we don't know the fact that Vice President Harris lost ground with Latino voters, non college educated,
female voters, young voters. I mean, there's clearly something else going on here, and I think it will take a while for us to really look at the data and understand what went on.
One thing that's really striking to me again, the data is still continuing to sort of come out here, Brad, and there's been a lot of hand ringing by a lot of different groups here at this point. But turnout just wasn't there, even on the Republican side in terms of gross numbers compared to twenty twenty. Do you have any idea what happened there?
I mean, it's yeah, it's I mean, maybe there's a little bit of political exhaustion. I mean the Vice president, you know, talked a little bit about that on the campaign trail. You know, in twenty twenty, the election we're comparing it to we were in the very midst of the pandemic. You know, maybe there weren't all that many alternatives at the time to getting engaged in the electoral
process and voting. You know, there might have just been something about the options and the candidates that voters had to turn them off. So no, I think, you know, when when you look, particularly on the Democratic side, the depressed voter turnout was a major factor behind the across the board defeats Brad.
You know what's really striking to me, And we actually heard this from Jay Powell over and over again this afternoon. He talked about how good of an economy it is right now, spot firing on all cylinders, inflations coming back to two percent, the unemployment rate is pretty in balance with where he wants it to be. That's not the that I got in terms of this election. That's not the message that voters sent, especially in those swing states.
What's the misery index? And explain how you looked at that.
Yeah, Bloomberg had I thought a very prescient article about a week ago that talked about how uneven that economic recovery was and that despite the overall positive kind of macro numbers on jobs, on inflation, on gas prices, that
you know, there are pockets of unhappiness. And we looked at the swing states where you know, states like Wisconsin or Michigan, Ohio, states that did vote for President Trump, where the misery index, as you say to him, that combination of inflation data unemployment data is still very high. And so there are things like population declines in some counties, still a stumbling recovery, high unemployment numbers that were clearly fueling the dissatisfaction that may have turned the election.
It's so interesting because it seems like the chattering class kind of thought that presidential candidate, who has been accused of so many different things, who has been determined by a court to actually be a fellon thirty four different counts, and has had so many struggles at least with the law over the last few years, oversaw not really what he would say, but no question that he was there on January sixth, and all the comments that he's made
about that have been well documented. But that just didn't matter at all in the end to voters.
Well, certainly not to a majority of the voters that turned out in the selection. You know, maybe it did propel some to stay home.
You know.
It may also be that people have short term memories. I mean, my colleague Mark Million writes today in the BusinessWeek newsletter about nostalgia. Nostalgia can be a powerful political force, you know, make America great again. Reagan's shining City on a hill, evoking these memories. So, you know, nostalgia as
a political force. I kind of like the idea, but it also maybe suggests that specific memories aren't as powerful as these vague memories of a greater time, and that in talking about making America great again and all the implicit things in that statement, you know, that Trump is distracting people from the specifics of maybe how they felt about his leadership during the pandemic, how they felt about some of his you know, crimes alleged and otherwise, and
brought their attention more on, you know, restoring this sense, maybe illusory, that he can help, you know, bring America back to some previous greatness.
So so, you know, I'm wondering about sort of the lesson, and it's not our job to sort of give a lesson to democrats here. But as I mentioned, there's a lot of hand ringing going on, and we've written about that. It's it's been well documented. But the day morning or the Wednesday morning quarterbacking there should have, would have could have it sort of seems like, in hindsight, some of it actually went back to the current president's decision to continue running until that became untenable.
Well, look, I mean, Tim, I'm not a political analyst by any means, but you know I would say this. I mean, first of all, the margin of the victory, you know, for Trump was so big that you know, perhaps any one factor might not have even had made a difference. And too, you know, the Democratic Party, you know the fact that there is no longer a chance or a hope of changing minds in Ohio, you know, my home state, or Florida used to be a swing state.
The fact that the Democratic Party doesn't speak to you know, middle class or lower class voters in states like Arkansas or Oklahoma, you know where you know, arguably voters there might appreciate some factors of the Democratic agenda, raising the you know, the minimum wage, restoring protection for healthcare and insurance. You know that they that the Democrats rely on, you know, three Midwestern swing states, the so called blue Wall, or
hope to turn Arizona or Nevada or North Carolina. It just feels like there needs to be an overhaul, you know, a rebalancing of expectations in the Democratic Party if they really hope to compete going forward.
Yeah, you know, it's funny you mentioned blue Wall, but I've heard people say they might need to rechange or change the name of that given what's happened in the last three elections, whereas Democrats only won the Blue Wall states in one of those last three, and that was in twenty twenty. Hey, I wanted to talk about with you some of the other stories that you and the team over at Bloomberg BusinessWeek have been highlighting in recent days.
There's been a lot of handwringing about polling and the idea that every poll that we got, save for a couple polls that people thought were outliers at the time, really showed this race neck and neck a coin flip. It's pretty remarkable to see. You're the team Chadwick Matlin and Alex Tanzy argue that even though there was a red wave, we shouldn't be blaming the polls. What's going on here.
I may not be so charitable as Alex and Chad on this one. You know, there is an argument and polsters make it that, Hey, the results were within the margin of error. So they weren't technically wrong. And Chad and Alex right that polsters are often more accurate than they are precise, which to me feels a little bit like you know, when your football team loses and they still say they played a great game. You know, It's
like all these states, all the swing states. Sure they might have been within the margin of error, they're still very close, but they all underestimated Trump support. They were all sort of directionally wrong in the same way. And then you look at states like Florida or Texas, and they really extremely underestimated Trump's support, well outside the margin of error. And I think that, you know, polsters still haven't quite figured out Donald Trump's support this time around.
They waited their results, they tried to account for communities, like is the respondent in a rural area, or how did they vote previously? And I just don't think they have quite figured it out or gotten it right. And I think you know, if you were, if you made the mistake once again of putting your faith in the polls, you were probably very disappointed last Tuesday night.
Yeah, that's a good point. In the outlier polls that I was talking about, I mean, there have been these you know, sort of opium polls for Democrats out there, like the one we got Saturday night from Anne Seltzer that showed that Vice President Harris is actually leading in Iowa by a margin.
Of four whatch is fourteen points.
Yeah, it was wasn't even close. So it's pretty remarkable to see that. Do you think, Brad, that we have to as Americans have to adjust the way that we view polling or do we have to figure out a better way to poll because it just seems like and Billy hous was talking about this earlier on Bloomberg Radio. You know, he would speak to people wearing Trump gear in some states and they wouldn't tell him who they
were voting for. They were even skeptical of someone like him, despite the fact that they were signaling it to the world.
Yeah, I mean, my opinion is it's a it's a broken science. You know, it relies on a voluntary response from people that are now connected in all sorts of
different ways. We're all besieged by text messages and spam and other kinds of unsolicited email, and so most people's instinct is to kind of reject an unsolicited query, and you know, and then you layer on top of that that we live in such a polarized environment that some people don't want to express their opinion because they might be you know, they might they might feel judged by their community. And so I think, you know, the polling community needs to kind of come together and figure out
if there is a path forward. And then yet, as voters is in the in the media, as the electorate, I think that relying on polling right now is very dangerous.
Help us figure out the path forward a little bit the best you can, not asking you to make predictions, but you are one of the few people who has sat down with President elect Trump in recent months. You did that down at mar A Lago for a Bloomberg BusinessWeek cover story that really covered pretty much every gamut of the economic agenda of the president elect. Give us an idea of how you view, if any his agenda
has shifted since then. It was before his assassination attempt, it was before the convention, it was before his selection of JD. Vance, and it was of course before he won the election. Versus what you've heard from him now and how he puts that into action in the coming months during the transition, and what that looks like January twentieth.
I mean, Tim, I just have no idea. Look, he might have all the branches of government. He's feeling extraordinarily empowered. He's feeling totally vindicated. There will be no checks on the appointees to his cabinet, to judicial postings, you know. At the same time, like my impression of him when we did go down there in July and just watching him over these past ten years, is that, you know, he does see himself as a man of the people. He wants to be liked. It's extraordinarily important to him
to be liked and respected and admired. And I don't think that impulse goes away now that arguably he's not going to ever face election again. So when it comes to some of the things that he's proposed, you know, mass deportations or tariffs that could you know, according to economists, raise the rate of inflation, you know, he's not going to have any practical moderating influences. But you know, he doesn't want to. I don't think it's in his nature
to want to do broadly unpopular things. So I do wonder if that will end up being a check on some of his instincts, although you know, the one thing that we heard from him on Tuesday night was he said, you know, promise is offered, promises will be fulfilled. So I do expect him, you know, to come into office looking to immediately put points on the board and to fulfill some of the promises that he made on the campaign trail.
Look, I'm not going to ask you to give up what you're talking to new reporters about in your editorial meetings, but you have a job that requires you to think pretty clearly about what things will look like in the next few months, because they're responsible for assigning stories and understanding what people are going to be talking about in the future. How are you thinking about covering the president elect.
We're going to be looking very precisely at the challenges and battles ahead for the new administration, and we have reached out into the Bloomberg newsroom around the world to look at, you know, what is ahead in Europe and China, in immigration, cryptocurrencies, on wall streets, and in tech. You know, we were thinking of it in terms of the battles ahead, and it'll be interesting now because I'm not so sure
there will be battles. You know, Trump isn't going to have a lot of political opposition if he does control all three branches of Congress. But you know, certainly we saw today Gavin Newsom calling a special legislative session in California, a lot of the states girding to try to put checks on what the administration will do, either legislatively or
in the courts. And so that's our approach, you know, to cover it carefully and to try to look forward rather than back and look at you know, what the Trump agenda will look like and what it will mean for business.
Well, we look forward to following the story closely and following it at Bloomberg Business Week. Brad really appreciate you taking the time to join us this afternoon. Bradstone is Bloomberg Business Week Editor. He's also the author of four books, including the New York Times bestseller Amazon Unbound, Jeff Bezos
and The Invention of a Global Empire. If you do want to subscribe to Bloomberg Business Week and unlocked deep reporting and analysis from our reporters around the world, including unlimited access to the magazine, check out our offers right now at Bloomberg dot com. Slash subscribe now.