 This is Stink Tech, Hawaii. Community matters here. One. Bingo! We're back with Lou Punearisi of E-Princk. He's the CEO. He joins us from Washington, D.C. as he does every couple of weeks at 3 p.m. Welcome back to the show, Lou. I'm good to be here, Jack. So last Tuesday we had Election Day, and a lot of got a lot of talk. We did. We did indeed. Everybody, you know, said this is going to change the world, or it could change the world, and maybe it did change the world, but tonight our inquiry is how did it change energy in America? Yay! How did it change energy in America, Lou? You know, I don't think it changed it a lot, but I do think that it's important to go through the election and to see what kind of signals that the voters are telling their political bosses, the things they care about, the things they don't care so much about, and where they want the focus from the political leadership, and the kinds of things they absolutely do not want, and we're going to get to those at the very end of the discussion here. So why don't we just start off and see what happens? Okay. Let's pull up the first picture here, the first slide, and this shows what happened at the midterms. And if you look at the table here, you can see data from selected midterms, 1994, 2006, 2010, 2014, 2018. And the way to look at this chart is this table is that the blue are Democrats. What happened to them? And the red is what happened to the Republicans. So if you go back to Obama's first midterm, like when he pushed Obamacare in 2010, in the House, he lost 63 seats, you see that, right? The Democrats went down by 63 nets, they lost six senators and six governorships, right? And then Obama took another hit in 2014, but now we go to 2018. And in this one, it's quite interesting, Trump did lose, and he lost substantially in the House. Now, he could have lost as much as Obama, 63, but he lost 38, and that might rise. Some races still have not been tabulated yet. Counted everybody in some of these places like Florida, California, but he's down 38 seats in the House and the Democrats have taken over the House of Representatives. He's probably up two in the Senate. He might be as up as much as four. We don't know yet. And he lost seven governorships, right? The Republicans did. Interesting also is state legislative seats, 308 across our large continental country, including Alaska and Hawaii. So I think the first thing there is that that should be a signal that the voters, and I'm going to show you a bit what the economy is doing quite well, but still, the voters, something is bothering the voters, at least this is the first sign of it, and we'll talk a little bit what those issues are. And by the way, it's a kind of spoiler alert. It's not climate that's bothering the voters. It's very important. It's not climate, and it's not energy. It is kind, and there's a little bit of energy and we'll get to that. So let's go to the next slide. And one of the things I'd like to just pull away from this slide here, this picture here, is change is the new normal line. It's really hard for the voters to get comfortable with anybody. And the red line there represents the percent, and you can see this along the vertical column to the right, the percent of the polled public who believe the country is going in the wrong direction. And the green is those that think the country is going in the right direction. And you can see that you have to go back to the early, very early 2000s where those who thought we were going in the right direction exceeded those who believe are going in the wrong direction. And so out of eight of the last 10 elections, we had either a change of control in the White House, the House of Representatives, or the Senate. So the public is, you could argue, either the leadership is very inept or the public is very fickle. But whatever it is, people are unhappy with the last group and, you know, throw the bums out sort of thing. Okay. Now, the other interesting issue, let's go to the next picture here. I think it's also important to look, if you look at this chart, it's sort of the yellow is the kind of, you know, estimate of who's the percentage of the population that's opposing, you know, sending a message about opposing versus support. And you can see here that in all these cases, right, particularly going to Bush and Obama, you have a large number, you know, the percent opposing the president rose to a high level. And that, you know, either oppose or those who actually support the president are less than a majority that doesn't fare well at the election. Okay. So people do like, voters do like to send a message. And the message is even though we have a good economy, there's something about Trump that fire up the voters in this last election. It didn't work in the red states where a lot of the senators were up, but it worked in a lot of even traditional house districts. But, you know, Trump is kind of, you know, he's out there, but he's not by himself. Okay. Now, let's go to the next slide, which I think is interesting. And this is a very, this is the freshman class, 1967 to 2019. And what this shows is of the 435 members of the House of Representatives, what number had never been there before? Well, brand new. And this is not the highest number, but it's one of the highest years. And a very skilled democratic operative told me a very interesting story yesterday that one of the things they believe Trump did for the Democrats in this party was not that it turned out the voters, which it did, but that for the first time in many cycles, they were able to convince highly qualified candidates who were never interested in running for office, to run for office. So many of these, most of these 92 new democratic members, they don't come from the system in the sense that they were an assemblyman and a school board member and worked their way up, right? They were very attractive candidates, at least like two former CIA agents, a Navy SEAL, a kickboxer, right? So these are people who are very well-known in their communities, very committed, bright young men and women who historically would not... I'm not running for office, that's a kind of ridiculous job, but they were so compelled to serve. And I do think in this sense they were compelled to serve because of Trump, right? They said, well, okay, somebody has to step up and deal with this guy. And so that's kind of how the Democrats recruited them, and they did a very good job. I would say this is a very... It's a very diverse group of individuals, lots of women, and it is oddly enough not necessarily anti-business or anti-economic growth. I don't think it's in that tradition, so it's going to be very interesting. I was told that there's a large number of traitors among the group. So I took that as a kind of a positive sign. Okay, so let's move to the next one. I think this is very interesting. So what this shows is that these... If you look at this, the number... What this chart shows you is the number of Senate delegation in which one member is a Democrat and one is a Republican. And historically, that number was a lot higher than it is today. So if you go back to 79, 80, 81, 82, you can see 27, 25, 24 states or delegations, Senate delegations had split. But now you can see the emerging polarization, at least of the parties in the Senate, in which except for only nine states now, all the other states are either blue or red. So Hawaii to the Democrats, right? You're always going to have two Democrats in Hawaii until they really screw up, which may be, you know, until something cataclysmic happens. And in Texas, you're going to have two Republicans. So that's just the way it is. But this notion that there was more common ground between the parties appears to be disappearing if you use this particular dataset. So we're becoming more polarized. One of the interesting parts of Mueller's investigation is how Russia, through Trump or otherwise, affected the vote in 2016. Recently, there's been a series of articles and, I guess, documentary movies published in the New York Times about Russia's attempts to polarize different groups in the US over a long period. Way before Trump was elected, where they would try to separate rich and poor, black and white, any kind of group they could find, racially, religiously, or economically, in order to, you know, make division, make divisiveness in the country on this long-term theory. And what this tells me in the midterms is that they're still succeeding at doing this, because I think they're still trying. Well, I do think, I think, look, clearly we need to deal with the Russians and stop this. I am somewhat, I mean, and I do think that nature of technology and the way Facebook and everyone operates and the inability of people to sort through fake news, it's a problem, a big problem. The Russians will stir the pot wherever they can. But this polarization in our society is not because of the Russians, right? It is because of sort of fundamental shifts in American society, the very rapid advancement of technology, the large upheaval in traditional manufacturing sector, the spiking of incomes in the technology sector versus the rest of the country. But I think there are other more fundamental forces that play. I mean, if you could really alter the US election for some Facebook ads and a couple hundred thousand dollars, the Democrats or Republicans would have tried 10 years ago, okay? So I think there's a problem with the way information and fake news, but I think we have to kind of address the core issue here, which is not necessarily the Russians. Okay, okay, so, okay, but well, we won't get to the question of energy yet, we'll just look and see how it played out. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we will get to the question. Okay, so let's move to the next slide here. So I think this shows some of the problem of this polarization. So as you can see here, the, let me pull it, that the Democrats, if you take 153 of the Democrats, two of those 232 members, right? So the 153 of the 232 will come from the east or the west coast, but that's quite, that's quite a cultural divide. And you can take a look at this map here and look at the blue, right? And you can see, and if I were to do a map of the land war, you would see the Senate or the governorships would be, it would be all red, you would think the Republicans rule the country, but they rule a lot of empty land, you know? The coasts are where the population centers are, dominated by the Democrats. And these are people with like millennials, large number of immigrants, highly diverse societies, you know, populations, generally more liberal, more greater belief in government, they like a lot of government intervention. And this is part of the polarization that's taking place now, because the center of the country tends to be more conservative, less reliant on government, more interested in gun control and very lot of traditional values, more committed to free markets. And so this kind of, how we bridge this gap is becoming a more serious problem. And part of it is how we're, I mean, you know, people say, how can the Democrats change the electoral manner? And the only really good idea is we're not gonna change the electoral system, is just send a bunch of hipsters to Iowa. That is the only really good idea. Well, it interests me that you have these Democrats, the liberals actually sprinkled over places that are really not well populated at all. And I find that interesting. Some of those states where the blue dots appear are really conservative states in general. Yeah, yeah, there are some, there are some. There are blue dots. I mean, there are plenty of, I mean, there are plenty of, actually the Democrats in Texas, you saw that Beto O'Rourke, this guy challenged Ted Cruz. Yeah. He came pretty close. Yeah. I mean, I thought it was hilarious, people saying, well, you know, we should vote for the Hispanic, because the Hispanic was Ted Cruz, not Beto O'Rourke. Isn't that so interesting? Yeah, Beto somehow represented the Hispanics more than Hispanic represented the Hispanics. But you know, a footnote to that is that Beto is a very popular guy. And there's all these calls right now going around the country, suggesting that he should run for president in 2020. I've seen it. I've seen it. And clearly, if he had won, he would have been a leading candidate, I believe. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Okay, let's take a short break, Lou. Okay, so. Let's take a short break and we'll come back for the rest of the slides and try to make sense of this on an energy level. Lou Puliarisi, Ebrink, he's the CEO. This is Energy in America. You'll see, we'll be right back. This is Think Tech Hawaii, raising public awareness. Choose to treat it with the help of a physical therapist. Physical therapists treat pain through movement and exercise. No warning labels required. And you get to actively participate in your care. Choose to improve your health without the risks of opioids. Choose physical therapy. Aloha, I wanna invite all of you to talk story with John Wahee every other Monday here at Think Tech Hawaii. And we have special guests like Professor Colin Moore from the University of Hawaii who joins us from time to time to talk about the political happenings in this state. Please join us every other Monday, Aloha. Works. All right, we're back, Lou. Lou and I were just talking about this information during and you gotta crank that into your analysis somewhere because these days it seems like it's everywhere. But anyway, Lou, so let's, we got more slides. Let's look at them and get a handle on, you know, how the country came out. You're right. So let's go to the next one. I think this is very important, right? Because there's a lot of people going around saying, well, you know, with, for example, today and a dozen core deaths yesterday. She took 51 students into Speaker Pelosi's office and you might not know this woman, Anastasia Cortez, was the new Democratic representative from Brooklyn who defeated a very old line Democrat by the name of Crowley. She took 51 climate activists, students in Speaker Pelosi's office, a member of her own party and said that they were going to stay there until they were arrested or some genuine action was taken on climate threat. Now, she conveniently left before the police arrived and the students were read, but I think Nancy Pelosi camped it down. And I think this is her first taste of what she's up against with this new crew coming in, you know, from the Democratic side. Don't you love it? Don't you love to see a little party machine? Don't you love to see a little shake up, you know, Lou? We need to have a little shake up there in Congress. We need to have some protests. Well, we're going to have it. Right? So let's take a look at, you know, what did the Democrats talk about? And actually, I spoke to a friend yesterday who was, his job was to kind of, at the Democratic National Committee, look at all the races in a Monday, which ones needed the most help, he would leave on Monday, go out to whatever district it was, come back on Thursday and work on Friday and Saturday to think about, well, what are they going to do next week? Who needs money? Who needs an issue management? Things like this. And this particular data shows what did the Democratic focus on, right? Did they focus on climate or oil and gas development or renewable fuel? And the answer to that is no. The what do, and they focus on the things that had traction with the voting public, right? They're not stupid. They're not going to pitch things that don't work. They do a lot of work on it. And you can see here that the Democrats, number one issue was healthcare. That's what they went with. In fact, the typical ad, which I was showing you the typical ad would be, if anyone's going to talk about climate, they talked about air pollution. They talked about air pollution very briefly. And then they might have said something about, well, air pollution climate was the same, but they quickly moved to healthcare and then taxes, budget and government standing these kinds of things. So the whole focus was to go on traditional bread and butter government issues. And that worked for the Democrats, right? Well, could they have done better, Lou? I mean, do you think, and yes, we knew in the paper that people were saying, a lot of press was saying that they were focusing almost exclusively on healthcare, where they might have done better if they had taken other issues as well, or focused on some issue other than healthcare. What do you think? Well, I think, you know, they tried to get to the basic unfairness of the U.S. system. You can look at these other issues that they focused on, you know, but I think if something's missing from this list, it's missing for a reason. But then they don't believe and that this, you know, generally the people spend money and ads with campaigns is a lot of research on whether it has any, sometimes it doesn't work and they make mistakes. I agree with you, but in this case, it did work and they knew where the payoff was. And it wasn't not, it wasn't on a lot of issues, let's say the elites worry about. It was really a much more bread and butter type of thing. You can argue whether the ads were saying. So let's go to the next slide then to look at factors and, you know, what the president's midterm law is. And I think, so President Trump's approval on election day was about 24%, right? And he lost 37 seats. But you can see here that President Obama had, had 45% of approval, right? And he lost 63 seats. And you can see that these, but the general trend, if you look at that, the higher your approval, the less seats you lose. And so I think while there were lots of issues, there was lots of issues, Trump did bring down the ticket, right? He brought down the ticket in two ways. More people voted for the Democrats and the Democrats were able to recruit the very good candidate. I think those are the two, those are the takeaways. I doubt that, you know, Trump got this lesson, but this is the lesson he should get from the exercise, right? So then I'd like to... Does that mean that if you're not, if you have a low approval on election day, you do better? Your party does better? No, no, the date is clear. The higher your approval on election day, you know, the bigger the black bar here, the more your approval is, the less seats you lose. You don't want to be, the president is on the ballot, whether he's on the ballot or not. That's what all that shows. It's kind of common sense. And so I think if you go... But here's the thing I want to show you, which I think is interesting, I have a huge number of slides that I'm just going to show you in one. What's interesting to me about this whole thing is that this outcome for the Republicans occurred even though business optimism has recovered, the market's down a little bit down now, but stock market has done well. Unemployment is at a historic low, 3.7%. And you can see here, all business optimism is up, and it's all off of the trend line. The trend line under Obama was pretty flat. And this is a contribution, actually. Maybe it came out of the atmosphere or maybe Trump had something to do with it. He did change the outlook. And we have capital goods, all this stuff. And so he took this enormous opportunity and kind of destroyed it for himself. It worked in reverse. So Lou, let's get to the title of the show, which is... Let's go to the last slide, okay. Okay, last slide. So let's go to the last slide where we can get to it. Okay. So the question on all this is, how did renewable fuels and climate do on the ballot box? I mean, I think that's something all the folks that protesting the Nancy Pelosi's office ought to ask because ultimately the voters are telling us what they care about. So the first thing I think that's very interesting is if you look at the first bullet there, well, Washington voters defeated the state's carbon tax initiative, right? Almost everyone thought this was a lock, that people are kind of crazy in Washington state and they're very liberal, they'll vote for this. And they were gonna impose a tax of $15 a ton, starting with, this was defeated. And it was defeated pretty handily. And I spoke to a Washington state representative about two or three months ago and he was trying to think about how they might do this because he thought this was a set of companies, this was going to happen. So that's the first one. Then Colorado voters, even though they elected several Democrats, I think the new governor's Democrats, they defeated a Proposition 112. And this was a proposition which would have required all oil and gas development to be at least 2,500 feet away from any other structure, right? So there's a house. You know, from homes, schools, waterways, social culprits, this was handily defeated. Oil and gas is very important in the state of Colorado. But many, many folks thought that this would succeed. Didn't tell us close, right? I don't think I've got the Arizona one there. I've got one under, oh. So yeah, Arizona, Nevada voters did approve an increase in electricity renewable, but Arizona defeated a similar map, right? Interesting though, in California, and we hadn't talked about this, they was about measure to repeal Governor Brown's increase in gasoline taxes by 12 cents a gallon and that failed. And Florida restored voting rights to convicts, things like that. And then Medicaid expansion in Nebraska. So basically, what I would say is that the population focused on very, a combination of let's say Trump character issues or how he personally affects them, health care and very traditional issues of fairness and taxes, things like this. And did not see, were not compelled to do much for climate or renewable fuels. So this suggests that people don't see it as an important platform issue. They don't see it as important, that the country has moved on to other issues and that they've left climate behind, which is really tragic when you think about it. And they've left energy behind too. Well, they've not left conventional energy behind because the conventional energy more or less did well. I think some of the opposition to the renewable portfolio standards are a concern among the voters that those standards are costly and not delivering what they were supposed to deliver. I think that's clearly case in Arizona. It's very hot in the summer time in Arizona and people don't wanna pay a fortune for their air conditioning. It's not unreasonable, now you can argue. So if you're going to ask the public to sacrifice, if that's what it takes to do climate stuff, to pay more, to pay a carbon tax or something, you have to make the case for it. You have to go out there and make the case and explain why it's worth it. And I don't think the political leadership has done it. But there's a relationship, isn't there? I mean, they don't wanna pay the price of moving to clean energy and they're not too concerned about climate change. They're actually in a funny way. They're following Donald Trump's lead about how climate change is not a problem. Aren't they buying into that? I think they're buying into it in this sense that the existing political leadership has not demonstrated that they can do this in an adept way. In a way that's genuine and sustainable and cost effective. Voters are quite naive. They will vote for some. Look, in California, they were convinced they needed that tax for the roads. And the governor Brown and the state officials made a very strong pitch that that tax was needed to build the roads and it survived. But nobody was willing to make the pitch on climate. None of the political leaders. Well, you know. There's work to be done. I guess you could say that it follows the bully pulpit that a leader in a given country and especially in this country can have a significant effect on the way, you know, the priorities that people see and as revealed in the midterm elections. So that's a real big lesson. Right. It is, but also it's interesting that the opposition party as the Democrats also did not see this as a number one issue. Yes. They were going for health care. That's. Yeah, they went for something else because they felt they couldn't sell. Believe me, if they could have sold the climate they would have gone for it. Yeah. Just a lot of politicians. Most sides of the arc. Very interesting. Very interesting. Well, this is a thread that you and I will have to follow really forward as we learn something in the midterms. Well, thank you, Lou. Great to talk to you. Talked to you again in a couple of weeks. Same here. Enjoy it. Lou Plurici, President, CEO of E-Pring and Washington DC. Energy in America. Thank you so much. Good. Aloha. Thanks.