Jake Novak, Senior Editor at large and Host - Newsweek Joins Houston's Morning News

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Seven, twenty three is our time here in Houston's Born News. Yes,
follow the money when it comes to the election, Follow
the money. Who's smelling funky though?

Speaker 2 (00:09):
Gay out there?

Speaker 1 (00:10):
Really? Jimmy, you smell yeah?

Speaker 2 (00:12):
Follow the money.

Speaker 1 (00:12):
He smells good. He smelled good like a lady should. Yeah.
Ain't nothing funky going on in this room? All right?
Jake Novack is with us political and economic analyst. What
do you put more stock in, Jake, the the the
traditional polls that we you know, the Harris poll and
all these other traditional polls, or do you maybe put
more stock in who is backing who and who's who's

(00:35):
actually out there betting on Trump or Harris to win
the race? Yeah?

Speaker 3 (00:40):
I think that the reason why I would believe that
the betting markets, and I believe the betting markets are
more accurate as far as picking a winner. They don't
pick the point spreads as well, for those of you
who do your football betting, they don't do the point
spreads as well, but they do a better job of
picking the overall winner. And the reason is not because
they're smarter or they have so much more insider information.
It's because because they're much more agile Jimmy, they are

(01:02):
able to move much quicker. A poll, even if they're
a skewed poll in favor of one party or the other,
has to actually go through the motions of doing the surveys.
The betting markets can feel the data, look at the
data as it's coming in, and can adjust right away.
They don't have to do all the groundwork and all
the all the legwork. So that is why they're better,
quote unquote better when it comes to choosing the winner,

(01:24):
given the same amount of time to go through all
their data. I think the traditional polls are just as good,
but you know you see it, and I mean the
poll the poly market, and some of these other betting
sites that follow these elections. They move on the hour,
every hour, sometimes even more often than every hour, and
that's why they have a better track record because they
have that agility that a traditional pole does not have.

Speaker 2 (01:46):
I read one thing this morning saying that you cannot
always get people who want to vote to give you
the name because they're afraid they'll be ridiculed, whether it's
Trump or Kamala Harris. But if you ask them who
they think they're vote, their neighbors are voting for you're
seeing that Donald Trump is winning.

Speaker 3 (02:07):
Yeah, that's always a great I always suggest people to
ask that question when they're doing any kind of a poll.
And look, I actually think Donald Trump has been winning
in the polls since the June twenty seventh Biden debacle.
At that debate, and as bad as the candidate, Kamala
Harris has been, she has been a complete I didn't
think she would ever close the deal with the American public,

(02:28):
and in her defense, she didn't have a very large
window to do it. But she did not close the
deal with the American public. But her new name, the
new name getting into the public's eye. Most Americans didn't
know who the vice president was before she was made
the candidate. That's usually the case. It's not just a
Kamala thing. Most people don't on any given day don't
know the name of the vice president. So it created
what we call them polling statistical noise. Oh there's a

(02:50):
new name, who's this person? It just basically skewed the
polls for a while. I was wrong for how long
it was going to last. I thought about only last
six weeks or so. It seems like it lasted maybe
ten weeks. But I actually believe the polls have been
right where they are now since June twenty seventh. I
think this was an unwinnable race for the Democrats, who
can't replace your candidate that late in the game and

(03:10):
not have a tremendously damaged brand. They could have had
Tom Hanks as they replaced in candidate, and it would
have been an uphill battle. As it turns out, they
had a terrible candidate. So everything's kind of reverting back
to the norms of I guess four months ago.

Speaker 2 (03:21):
But media has painted the Kamala that people don't even
really know a lot of about her policies, the ones
who are the craziest about her because they just followed
the media lead. Do you think alternative media and especially
something like Twitter has turned the tide.

Speaker 1 (03:35):
On this well?

Speaker 3 (03:37):
It helped make it difficult for them to plausibly explain
why they weren't putting her out in front of the
public for the first six weeks of her campaign. You know,
if you think that the softball interviews were softball interviews,
when they finally started allowing her to have those interviews,
can you imagine what they would have been like in
the first two weeks after she replaced Biden. It would

(03:57):
have been like a junior mispageant interview. It would have
been all about how excited she is to be there,
and I'll talk policy later. And she would have probably
gotten away with that because it was just so new.
But by waiting six or seven weeks, waiting until after
she picked Tim Wallas, for example, there was no other
choice but to ask her, even in these friendly interviews,
a couple of policy questions, which is where she fumbled

(04:18):
so badly. She didn't do too terribly talking about her biography,
but when she started talking about her biography when they
wanted policy answers, that was a disaster. Yeah, and so
I think that was a huge mistake.

Speaker 1 (04:28):
Well, I think Jake too that the closing argument seems
to be Trump is Hitler. And when you're opening argument
and your closing argument are the same, then you know
how desperate things have become. Thanks for joining us, Good
to talk to you. Political and economic analyst, Jake Novak,
seven twenty seven