 I usually don't watch Bill Maher, unless I have a really good reason to, or unless somebody shares a clip. But apparently Michael Moore, who has a pretty good track record at making predictions, has a prediction about the 2022 midterm elections. And keep in mind, this individual predicted Trump's rise when nobody else really saw that coming. I didn't see it coming, right? I thought it was a possibility, but I certainly thought that Hillary Clinton would likely win over Donald Trump. But people like Michael Moore saw it. So he is making another prediction here. Is it a bold prediction? Yes. Am I sold on what he has to say? Not necessarily, but regardless, let's hear him out. Good winning filmmaker who's hit movie, Bowling for Columbine, makes its 20th anniversary this year. And he's the host of the podcast, Rumble with Michael Moore, my good friend, Michael Moore. Michael Moore. Mike. How are you? You look great. You look like Michael Less. I am feeling pretty good, actually. I've spent the pandemic trying to take care of myself. Yeah, you look great. I see you're in your bunker there with him. Hey, I was going to criticize him because he had a Ruth Bader Ginsburg action figure behind him, which is incredibly cringe. But he gets a pass because he has a Starbucks worker united hat on, showing solidarity with unions. Okay. Love to see that. Thank you, Michael. Undisclosed location. So listen, we've talked about the midterms many times here. I think there's sort of a bright spot there in the fact that the country is on the brink of disaster, which for the first time I can remember, the midterms are sexy. This is the one usually we had trouble getting people to go out and vote for. But now there's very high enthusiasm for a midterm election. So what do you think is going to happen? Well, just before I say what I think is going to happen, I need to preface it by telling everybody who's watching that everybody needs to show up and you need to bring five to ten people with you on election day. That's a lot of people, but make it, you know, play here, make it a fun thing, never party afterwards, whatever. But I honestly believe, Bill, and you and I are two well-known pessimists, I think. And I have never felt this optimistic and I was on your show here what's now six years ago when I said that Trump was going to win and the audience booed me and you stood up for me. I was just saying, look, I'm out, I'm around, you know, I'm from the Midwest. I think I had a pretty good sense of what was going to happen. I think the opposite is going to happen this time. I think that there is going to be such a landslide against the traders, especially the 147 Republicans, who just hours after the insurrection voted to not certify the elected president of the United States, Joe Biden. And I think that there is going to be so many people coming out to vote. I want to thank the Supreme Court for reminding women that they are in fact second-class citizens and taking their rights away like this. There are so many, I don't know if you've seen the list of states, starting with Kansas, which by the way, 60% of the people in Kansas a couple months ago showed up to say, no, we want abortion legal and we want it in our constitution. We want it to stay there. This is, I think that there's going to be such a massive turnout of women, 70% of all new registered voters in Kansas for women in Wisconsin, it's 17% more than men are registered. Well, let me just pause it here. This is a really good point that more women are registering and there was a spike in women registering to vote in key states like Pennsylvania, for example. After one, the draft opinion was leaked. And after the Supreme Court officially overturned Roe v. Wade, now one thing that is a little bit iffy about what he's saying here. And I don't know if he's right, I hope he is, but one thing that gives me a little bit more pessimism than him is even if you see these ballot initiatives like the one in Kansas or sometimes, you know, other ballot initiatives, the minimum wage in Florida, even if you see voters opt for the progressive option when it comes to individual policies. The problem is that sometimes these issues aren't as salient. So what do I mean by that? Well, we get these situations where voters, they'll vote affirmatively in support of the right to abortion or, you know, in favor of legalizing marijuana, increasing the minimum wage while simultaneously, you know, after voting that way in a progressive way on a ballot initiative, they'll vote for Republican candidates. Why does this happen? The same thing happened with regard to the 2020 Democratic Party primary. When voters, according to exit polls, at least overwhelmingly supported Medicare for all, but yet they still voted for Joe Biden. So why does this happen? How do we explain this phenomenon? Well, it's kind of difficult, right? Nobody really knows what's going through the minds of voters, but I think the takeaway is that people have different levels of salience for these issues. So in the state of Kansas, for example, while they may very strongly support abortion, their support for abortion is not as strong as their support for electing Republicans overall. So if you prioritize abortion here, but you prioritize Republicans getting elected here in spite of them going against abortion, well, you're going to opt for Republicans. And it's a little bit weird, right? Because they're doing this cost-benefit analysis, possibly subconsciously, right? Overall, they just agree with the policies of Republicans more. Not that Republicans have that much policies, but perhaps they've, you know, agreed with the fear mongering when it comes to CRT and whatnot. So that's how you can explain that. And why I don't have that much hope from stories like this, because even though it's an encouraging sign and even though, you know, people are going to opt for progressive policies, they still might think, OK, well, you know, I support the border wall more than I support abortion. Therefore, I'm going to vote for this Republican who's going to carry out Trump's policies. I believe the election was stolen, and that's more important to me than the issue of abortion. People rank things differently. So that's why it's hard to say definitively that one issue is going to influence the entire election. But to Moore's credit here, you know, women are registering in droves and that is correlated like the jump in women registering to vote is correlated with the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade. So I really hope that he's right here. We'll look at some polls here in a second about Pennsylvania 12 percent. I mean, in most of these states, women who have these are women who have not voted, who've not been registered or coming out to register. And then look what happened in Alaska. Alaska really gets one member of Congress and elects a woman, a native Alaskan woman that's a great plan to defeat Sarah Palin. Alaska. This is like, there are so many signs of this that I think I honestly think if we all do our work and if we all get people to get out there and we get out there ourselves, we have a chance to do something that it does happen every now and then. 1993, Canada voted every conservative member in parliament, except for two, out of office. Gone. All of it. Except for two. In four years later, in Great Britain, 1997, every conservative member of the British parliament in Scotland, in Wales, and from Northern Ireland were all thrown out of office. I think we could throw out a huge number of these Republican traders in November. November 8. Look, I hope he's right about that. This is according to 538. When it comes to the Senate, Democrats are favored to retake the Senate, but when it comes to the House, Republicans are still favored. Now I want to caution you all about the Senate. In some of these states where Democrats are polling more favorably, these are states where the polls have been incorrect. This is why I'm a little bit more pessimistic than Michael Moore, although I do hope that he is the one who's proven right and I'm proven wrong. Polling has looked surprisingly good for Democrats. Are they being set up for disappointment again? So the last cycle in which Democrats really felt the polls didn't set them up for disappointment was 2012. Polls that year did fluctuate somewhat, but they usually showed President Obama as the favorite to win re-election and forecast models based on those polls did the same. There was however a dissenter, Dean Chambers, founder of the website Unsealed Polls. Chambers, a conservative, argued that most pollsters were systematically undercounting Republican voters, so he re-weighted their results to reflect the more Romney-leaning electorate he expected, unskewing them. Much mockery from liberals about this rather crude methodology ensued, and when the results of the election came in, Chambers got egg on his face. Obama and Democrats actually did somewhat better than the polls had showed. Here's the funny part. In every election cycle since then, Chambers would have had a point. Whether or not Democrats retake the Senate is based on these states where polling has been pretty inaccurate over the course of the last couple of cycles. Now pollsters have tried to adjust to account for the deficiencies in their methodology, but still it's something that you have to keep in mind because we just don't know.