California Isn't Voting For Politicians Anymore | Public vs. Private | Wacky Wednesday

California voted.

Turnout came in higher than expected.

Yet many of the results looked remarkably familiar.

Karen Bass survived. Xavier Becerra rose. Tom Steyer spent a fortune and still couldn't break through.

So what happened?

In this episode, Chad explores a new theory: California may be shifting from Democrat vs. Republican to Public vs. Private. A state where the status quo itself has become a political constituency.

This is a conversation about incentives, coalition building, turnout, unions, nonprofits, government growth, and why the future may belong to whoever can build the biggest tent.

📞 252-CHAD-LAW

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00:00 I Think I've Been Looking At California Wrong

03:00 Welcome To Common Sense

06:00 Why The Results Don't Add Up

13:00 Karen Bass & The Candidate Problem

21:00 Xavier Becerra & Continuity Politics

31:00 Public vs. Private

42:00 The Status Quo Has Voters

50:00 Hilton, Bianco & Coalition Building

56:00 Reagan Reminder & Closing

#CaliforniaPolitics #CaliforniaElection #PublicVsPrivate #BigTent #SteveHilton #KarenBass #XavierBecerra #ChadBianco #SpencerPratt #TomSteyer #CoalitionBuilding #RonaldReagan #CommonSense #ChadLaw #WackyWednesday #PoliticalCommentary

Transcript

Chad Law: America, I want to tell you about the prediction I got wrong. Not a candidate, not a winner. I got the whole shape of the night wrong. really did. Here's what I figured turnout be in the toilet. Nobody shows up. The usual machine grinds out a sleepy little win. We all nod and go to bed. So I'm watching the results come in, and turnout was better than I expected. More people voted than I thought would. People showed up this time. It's awesome. I love being wrong in a good way. And here's the part that's been chewing on me since. See, the results came back familiar. This is exactly where I thought things would land. More people voted, and the night still rhymed with every night before it. Karen Bass, a mayor where something like three and five voters were trying to show her the door, is into the runoff. Xavier Bacara, a man nobody was making bumper stickers about, rises right to the top of the Democratic pile. Reality TV in a runoff for mayor of LA, a sheriff pulling real numbers, a billionaire who spent like a small country finishing behind the guy nobody can spell. So stay with me. If low turnout was supposed to be the story and turnout came in higher than I expected and the results still landed in the almost exactly same place, then turnout was never really the story. So what is? Because if turnout wasn't the story, then what on earth am I actually looking at? What are you looking at? Hold that question because I can't shake it. I'm Chad Law, the last gay conservative, America's binary brother, the common sense extremist living in radical reality. Broadcasting truth on the only rainbow that matters the red, white, and blue rainbow. Restoring common sense in the American household, the line is open to five two Chad Law. You call, I read, we have fun with it. And this is common sense. If it's your first time here, let me tell you what kind of show this is so you can decide if you're staying. This is the big tent. Most of politics, the loud part screaming at you all day is a fight about 20% of stuff no one really cares about. The emotional twenty. The stuff designed to get your blood up and your wallet open. We don't live there. We live in the boring 80, the 80% where most normal people quietly agree and nobody's getting rich off telling you so. We meet at our agreements, not our disagreements. There's no purity tests here. I'm not gonna check your conservative membership card at the door. There's no outrage addiction. We're not doing the thing where I get you furious for an hour and send you to a bed angrier and dumber than you woke up. No. So If what you want is a guy screaming the same talking points you already heard from nine other guys today, I'm probably not your show, and that's okay. And I wish you well. Because here's the actual job. Politics has been made complicated on purpose, confusing on purpose, buried and lawyered and dressed up in $40 words so that you, the normal person, throw up your hands and tune out. That's the scam. I'm the translator. I take it. Hand it back to you, factual, funny, and in plain English. This show exists to put a few things back into conservative media that have gone missing. A little class, a little consistency, a little ho humor, and a little common sense. And the one that matters most, a little intellectual honesty. That's the tent. It's big, there's room, so pull up a chair. All right, let's get back to the question from the top, because I have to be honest with you about something. And honesty's the whole brand here, right? I think I was wrong. Not about the results. I called a lot of those roughly where they landed. I was wrong about something bigger. I think I was wrong about what explains the results. For years I've explained California to you the same way everybody does. And last night, sitting there with my spreadsheet and my snacks, I'm not proud of, the story I've been telling stopped fitting the numbers. So let me walk you through the theories I always reach for and why every one of them came up short. Theory one. Maybe people are secretly happy in California. No. Come on, you can't drive across this state and tell me that's happiness. The cost of everything, the houses nobody can buy, the tents, the insurance letters, my own friends loading up trucks and waving goodbye in the rear view. People are not voting like this because they're thil thrilled. Theory one, I don't buy it. Theory two, turnout explains everything. This is my old, reliable, clean, simple, makes me feel smart. One problem. Turnout came in better than I expected, and the results still came back familiar. If nobody voted were the answer, then more people voting should have shaken things up. It didn't. So turnout's a piece of it, but it's not the whole story. Theory three the candidates are secretly fantastic. Have you met the candidates? I say this with love. Nobody is naming their boat after Javier Baccaria, and Karen Bass is not exactly a stadium filling phenomenon right now. There are not lightning in a bottle candidates, and yet they are surviving and rising. So theory three doesn't hold either. And that's where I get stuck. People aren't happy. Turnout went up. Nothing moved. The candidates aren't carrying the sun charisma. So I'm sitting there last night, three theories down, staring at a screen, and I get that little itch you get when you've been reading the map upside down for 20 minutes and the road finally stops making sense. And I thought, what if the problem isn't my answer? What if the problem is the question I've been asking the whole time? Maybe I've been looking at California politics completely wrong. The only way I know how to deal with an itch like that at two in the morning surrounded by snack wrappers is to put the whole thing on trial. So I'm playing detective. I line up the suspects, I sweat them under a hot lamp, and I ask one simple question. If Californians are so unhappy, and they are, the trucks are leaving, then why do the same kinds of candidates keep surviving? Let's bring in our first witness. Karen Bass. I'm not here to do the angry thing, you know, that's not the show. I want to do something harder. I want to be fair to her, because being fair to her is what makes this so weird. By the public mood, this was not a woman riding a wave of love. Something like three out of five voters cast a ballot for somebody who wasn't her. If you ran a restaurant and three of five customers walked out mid-meal to eat anywhere else, You would not call that a successful evening. Your Yelp page would read like a hostage note. And yet she finished on top that primary and punched her ticket to November. The dissatisfaction was real and it still didn't finish the job. That's the whole theory of elections, right? You're mad, you vote ⁓ out. sixty percent reached for the exit, and the exit didn't open. I don't have an answer yet, I'm just writing it on the board. Bass should have been wounded and wasn't. Witness two, and this one's What started the whole spiral is Javier Baccaria, sitting in second, right at the top of the Democratic side. And I need you to picture the room he was standing in because it was crowded. Tom Steyer was in there with money for days. Katie Porter, a national name and a real fan base. Via Ragosa, decades of experience. Mayhan, the let's fix it stuff energy. And on top of all that, Eric Swalwell had already stepped out before the votes. So the lane got even wider. Money in the room, celebrity in the room, experience in the room, an open road practically gift wrapped. And the guy who rises to the top is Javier Baccaria? I want to be respectful. The man has a resume. But I think even his biggest fans would admit he campaigns with the raw electricity of a man reading you the terms and conditions before you can use the Wi-Fi. He's a respectable beige. And here's the puzzle. In a room with money, fame, experience, reform, and an open lane, the coalition walked past all of it and landed on the most institutionally least flashy option available. It's like going to the world's biggest buffet, seafood tower, prime rib, a chocolate fountain the size of a Buick, and walking out with a dinner roll. Nothing wrong with a dinner roll, but you had options, California, so why him? On the board, Vacera, least exciting option, rose anyways. I don't get it yet, but I'm starting to feel a pattern forming under these names. Bring in the next one. Tom Steyer. There's an old, comfortable theory that says money wins. Spend the most win. Democracy is just an auction with extra steps. Okay. If that's true, explain Tom to me. This man can write a check that needs its own area code, and he spent like he was trying to buy back a lost decade. And it landed him in third. Third! He spent enough money to finish behind a guy half the state thinks is a typo. That's like buying every billboard on the freeway, renting a blimp, hiring a sky rider and a marching band, and still losing the student council election to a kid whose entire platform is more pizza Fridays. And I say that not just to dunk on him, okay, a little to dunk on him, but mostly because it wrecks my theory. Money is the master key. Tom should be measuring the drapes in the governor's mansion right now. Instead, he's somewhere refreshing the same results page I was, going, third? On the board, Steyr spent a fortune, came in third, money theory dead. So now I interrogate the theories properly, one alibi at a time. People are happy. Doesn't hold. I've seen the state. The best candidate always wins. Then the magic candidate would be the one standing, and they're not. Money decides everything? We have a little problem named Tom Steyer. And my favorite, my ride or die, turnout explains everything. Well, I hate this part because turnout came in higher than I expected, and the night still landed in the same familiar place. So even that one doesn't fully explain it. And that's the moment I sat back in my chair. Look at the board. Happy voters crossed off. Magic candidates crossed off. Money crossed off. Turnout, and that one hurt, crossed off. I've eliminated every suspect I walked in with. And in a detective story, when you've crossed off everyone and somebody's still clearly standing there, that doesn't mean the case is closed. It means you've been investigating the wrong thing. Maybe I've been asking the wrong questions this whole time. I keep asking, which candidate won and why? Candidate, candidate, candidate. But what if the candidates were never the point? Different candidates, different races, different cities, different personalities, beige ones, broke ones, rich ones, reality TV ones, and somehow the outcome keeps rhyming. That's not a candidate pattern. A candidate pattern would be all over the place. This is too consistent. It's like blaming four different bad meals on four different chefs and then realizing they all came from the same kitchen. So maybe the story isn't the candidates. Maybe the candidates are just the faces on something bigger that I haven't named yet. And if it's not the candidates, then what is it? So I sat with that longer than I'd like to admit. Four suspects crossed off, and I kept coming back to the thing that actually bugs me. They all rhyme, different cities, different names, same shape. So I stopped asking who's cooking, and I started asking, whose kitchen is this? And that's when it hit me. I think I've been looking at California politics all wrong. For years I've told you the same story everybody tells. California is Democrat versus Republican. Left versus right, run the play. But maybe that's not the real fight anymore. Maybe California isn't Democrat versus Republican. Maybe it's becoming public versus private. And the second I said it out loud to my empty living room like a lunatic, a bunch of stuff started clicking into place. I want you to picture a cruise ship, a big floating city, thousands aboard, and the ship hasn't been great lately. The buffet's gone downhill, the plumbing's making noises, you paid for an ocean view and got a porthole facing a lifeboat. On that ship, you've got two kinds of people. One group paid for the ticket, the customers, and they're looking around saying, This isn't what I was promised. I'd like the ship to change direction. The other group works on the ship, the crew, the kitchen, the engine room, whose paycheck and whole life right now depend on the ship staying its course. When the captain calls a meeting about whether to turn. Who's showing up? The annoyed customer who's also got a job back on land and figures somebody else will handle it? Or the crew, whose livelihood is tied up to the ship not turning. And I want to be clear because this is where people get me wrong on purpose. The crew aren't the villains. They're doing exactly what you and I would do. If your job, your pension, your whole future floated on that ship, you'd show up to that meeting early and bring friends. Which gives me the line I can't stop thinking about. People vote to protect what feeds them. That's not a conspiracy. That's not corruption. That's human. So I think there are two Californians now, and they don't split the way the cable map says. Private California wakes up asking, can I find a customer? Can I make payroll Friday? Their whole day hangs on people who can say no. Public California wakes up asking, will the funding continue? Will the budget pass? Different alarm clock, different fear, and neither one is evil. But it changes how you vote. If your nightmare is the customers vanishing, you want change. If your nightmare is the budget getting cut, you want things to say. One thing is voting for change, the other is voting for continuity. And continuity, it turns out, is extremely reliable about showing up. Let me put some size on this. And first, I have to tell you how not to use these numbers because the lazy version is where I add three big numbers together, get one scary total, and yell, I'm not doing that. Government payroll in California, federal, state, and local, runs somewhere around two and a half to two point seven million people. Teachers, the DMV, the university systems, city hall, the agencies, the inspectors. That's not a staff meeting. That's a mid-sized European country that happens to have dental coverage. Union members in California, roughly 2.5 million, the biggest total of any state. And while unions shrank almost everywhere else for 40 years, in California, they barely budged. They're the one houseplant you somehow can't kill. And nonprofit employees, around 1.7 million. Though I'll be honest, plenty of nonprofits never touch a public dollar, so I'm not lumping them all in. The big ones, though, have Housing, homelessness, behavioral health, public health, a lot of these live and breathe on government grants. So here's why I won't add those up. Picture one: public school teacher. She's a government employee and she's in a union. Add the buckets, and I just counted that woman twice. I turned one teacher into two voters with a calculator and a bad attitude. That's not analysis, that's a magic trick. The honest point was never a single giant number. It's the scale, however you slice it, however much they overlap. You're looking at millions of Californians tied to the system continuing roughly as it is. That's not a fringe. That's a constituency, period. And it's not just a headcount, it's the reach. And that's the part that got me. Picture the whole ecosystem. Government workers, the universities, the schools, the public unions. And then the next ring out. Housing groups, homelessness providers, behavioral health networks, the consultants who advise the agencies, the vendors who sell to them. Rings inside rings, like Russian nesting dolls, where every doll you open is another doll with a government grant. And these aren't scattered individuals, they're institutions, and these institutions organize. My frustrated private guy, the contractor, the trucker, is genuinely mad, but he's mad alone in his truck at six in the morning listening to me. I love you guys, keep listening. The institution has a list, a newsletter, an endorsement, a text tree, people who knock doors and remind you to mail the ballot. The private side feels anger, the public side runs an operation. And anger is no match for an operation. A thousand furious people who stayed home lose two hundred organized people who show up every time. Now, the uncomfortable part, the part nobody talks about, is what happens when you build whole industries around managing a problem. Take homelessness, take the harm reduction world. California's poured staggering money in, and around that money, an entire workforce grew up. Program managers, outreach teams, evaluators, consultants, consultants who consult the agencies. And here's the question I'll ask very carefully because I know how a bad faith person will clip it. What happens politically when an entire industry emerges around managing a problem? That does not mean these people want the problem. Most are sincere trying to help folks on the worst days of their life, and I honor that. But every institution, private ones too, develop a survival instinct. Not a villain instinct, a survival instinct. The org wants its doors open, the staff wants their jobs, the grant wants to get renewed. fire department doesn't start fires, but it's also not lobbying for fewer fires to mean fewer firefighters. That's not evil. That's what institutions do. Cartoon version, so it's obvious. Imagine a town, call it Mouseville, where half the people work for one giant theme park company with a famous mouse. Half the jobs, half the contracts, half the family budget trace back to that mouse. Then election season comes. There's a mouse-friendly candidate and a shake up the mouse candidate. Would anyone be shocked when the mouse-friendly one keeps winning? Of course not. You'd say, well, yeah, half the town's livelihood is tied to the mouse. Nobody calls that fraud. You just say people vote to protect what feeds them. So what if California is Mouseville, just much bigger, where the mouse is the system itself? And that's when the whole night flipped over for me. I kept asking, Why did this candidate survive? Wrong question. The candidate was really never the candidate. The candidate is temporary. The ecosystem is permanent. Karen Vass wasn't the candidate. Continuity was the candidate, and she was the name printed on it. Javier Becerra wasn't the candidate. Continuity was the candidate. Beige Institutional Becerra didn't win that room by being exciting. He won it by being the safest possible vessel for please don't change anything. Remember the buffet where the coalition walks out with a dinner roll? Well, I get it now. They didn't want the exciting thing because exciting is risk. They wanted the role because the roll will never surprise you. That's not a dinner choice, it's a survival choice. This really wasn't an election about personalities. It was more like an annual renewal, a giant subscription that quietly auto-charges no matter who's on the cover. The candidate changes, the direct deposit doesn't. So Here's where I've landed, and then I'm making myself stop. Now, if I'm right, and I usually am, then California hasn't just elected a bunch of Democrats over a bunch of years. It's spent decades quietly building a voting coalition whose number one interest isn't left, isn't right, isn't even a person. It's just keeping things the same. Millions of people whose paycheck, pension, grant, or mission is wired to the ship not turning. And if that's true, then I haven't just been wrong about a few races. I've been wrong about what we're running against. I kept thinking the fight was candidate versus candidate, but the thing the other side might not be a candidate at all. It might be a system that has learned how to vote for itself. And I need to sit with that because if we've misunderstood what we're up against, then everything we think we know about how to change it might be wrong too. Now I've got a theory, and a theory is a dangerous thing to fall in love with because your brain starts seeing it and you're serial. So I'm gonna do the thing I wish more people on TV did. I'm gonna try to break down my own idea. Public versus private, the coalition that votes for continuity. Let's put it on trial, race by race, can ask the cold question. Does this explain what happened better than the boring old answers? If it doesn't, I'll throw it right out here on the air. Start with Bass, because she broke my brain first. Old explanation, incumbents are hard to beat. True, but weak. It doesn't explain why dissatisfaction didn't finish the job when plenty of incumbents get bounced. Now run my theory. What if a big organized chunk of that city wasn't voting on whether they like Karen Bass, but on whether the machinery they depend on keeps running? The payroll, the agencies, the nonprofit networks threaded through that city on that city's dollar. To them, she isn't a personality, she's a setting. She's the leave everything as is button. And suddenly the thing that made no sense makes total sense. Karen Bass didn't have to inspire people, she just had to reassure them. Sixty percent reached for the exit, and the organized minority quietly held the door shut. Theory survives. Now the big one: reload Javier Baccaria. Steyer's money. Porter's national name, Via Ragosa's experience, Maehan's reform energy, and Swalwell already gone, so the lane was wide open. And the coalition pulls over and hands the keys to beige. The Democratic bench this year looked like a streaming homepage, big flashy thumbnails, a documentary about a billionaire, a limited series starring the whiteboard lady and California scold past all of it and put the channel that's just a fireplace. Reliable fireplace, but you didn't pick it because it's thrilling. You picked it because it will never surprise you. Old explanation. Bacara had name ID, sure. But Porter had name ID. Steyer bought it by the truckload. Name ID doesn't explain why the room wanted the safe name over the exciting one. Run the theory. If you're voting for continuity, excitement is a bug, not a feature, because exciting means change, and change means someone might reexamine my budget, my grant, or my job. But Sarah's whole appeal is that he re examines nothing. Some of those candidates were running campaigns. Continuity was running payroll, and payroll beats a campaign almost every time. But Sarah might be my best evidence yet. Which brings me back to Tom because Steyer isn't just funny, he's proof. If politics were nothing but money, this race was over before it started. He should have cruised. Instead, he got bronze. And here's the lesson: money can buy attention, but money cannot buy a coalition. Steyr could put his face on every screen in the state. But he couldn't manufacture a big block of people with a built-in reason to reliably show up and vote the same way. Same test on Porter, national attention, viral clips, the whiteboard, and it wasn't enough either because attention is an organization. A viral moment is a firework, beautiful, loud, gone in four seconds. An organized coalition is a pilot light, boring, quiet, still burning at 6 a.m. when the ballots are due. Steyer had fireworks, Bacera had the pilot light, and the pilot light won. Now we have to be careful. Spencer Pratt, the reality TV guy, second in the LA mayor's race. I'm not going to tell you Spencer Pratt is the savior of Los Angeles. That's not the take. When a chunk of a major city parks that many votes on a reality TV personality running against the incumbent, that's not an endorsement of his policy binder. I'm not sure there is a binder, to be honest. It's a flare. People standing on the roof of a flooded house waving a bed sheet at a helicopter. It's not, I love this guy. It's I'm trying to get somebody's attention and nothing else worked. So I read Pratt's number as a measure of how much private side frustration is sitting out there with nowhere organized to go. Loud, real, and not yet organized into anything that scares the pilot light. Same discipline on Chad Bianco, the Riverside County Sheriff. He got double digits in the governor's race. The dishonest move is for me to add Bianco's voters to Hilton's and announce Republicans win California. No. That's the same fake math I refused to do a minute ago, and I'm not getting loose with it just because the numbers on my side. Voters aren't poker chips you slide across the felt. The honest read, Bianco pulling real double digits, tells me the appetite for do something different is bigger than any one candidate's column. Those aren't guaranteed votes for anybody in November, but they're available. That's November's inventory sitting on the shelf, not bought yet. An inventory is only worth something if somebody knows how to sell. Now I owe you the hardest one, turnout. And I have to say the words I don't love. I was wrong. I was sure turnout would crater, and it came in higher than I expected. For a day I thought, well, there goes my whole world. Maybe more voters means a different result. And then I looked. More people showed up, and the outcome still rhymed. That's the moment that actually convinced me something else was going on, because here's the question that cracked it open. At what point does turnout stop being the explanation? If low turnout helps the machine and high turnout also lands in roughly the same place, then turnout was never the engine. Turnout's the weather. It changes the numbers a little, but it does not change who reliably shows up in rain or shine. And that's the word my whole theory keeps circling, reliability. Which is where I have to talk about unions carefully because this is exactly where a lazy host goes off the rails. I'm not saying unions are corrupt. I'm saying something more boring and more powerful. Unions are organized. That's their superpower. They endorse so members know who to vote for without homework. They mail real paper with a face on it. They text, did you get your ballot in? They knock doors, run phone banks, organize rides. They turn voting from a someday maybe into Tuesday to do with a reminder attached. Compare that to my guy in the truck. Big feelings, nobody texting him a reminder, nobody knocking on his door. He's an army of one and he's tired and the game's on. So here's the line between this whole segment and been walking towards. Private California gets frustrated, public California gets organized. The status quo doesn't need youth enthusiasm, it just needs attendance. Enthusiasm is loud, enthusiasm trends, enthusiasm gets clipped, but enthusiasm sleeps in. Attendance fills out the ballot and drops it in the box on the way to work. Most elections aren't won by the side that cares the most, they're won by the side that shows up the most. And one of my two Californias has built an entire machine around showing up. So let me total up the trial. Bass, better explained by continuity than charisma. Bacera, better explained by continuity than money or fame. Steyer proves money alone doesn't do it. Porter proves attention alone doesn't do it. Pratt, real frustration, not super organized. Bianco, a hungry pool out there unsold. Turnout went up and the shape didn't change, and the unions are the organization gap and living color. You see that, folks? I went in trying to break this theory and I couldn't. Every race I throw at it explains better than the answer I walked in with. So I'll say the thing out loud, and I don't say it lightly because changing my mind on air is the most expensive thing I do. I think this is real. I think California has built slowly, quietly over decades, no back room, no master plan, a voting coalition organized around continuity. Millions of people whose reliable interest is that the ship doesn't turn. And I think that, not the candidates, not the money, not the even the turnout, is why these results make sense. For the first time all night, the board doesn't bother me anymore. It reads clean. But, and it's a big but. If I'm right. I've just tucked myself into an uncomfortable spot. Because if the thing on the other side isn't a candidate, if it's a system that's learned to vote for itself, then beating it is a completely different problem than one everybody thinks we're solving. So here's the only question that matters now. If that's the problem, then what on earth does that mean for November? When I first landed on all this, my gut reaction was grim. Great. The other side isn't even a candidate. It's a machine that votes for itself. We're cooked. I sat in that about 10 minutes, and then I caught myself because that's the lazy ending, the one where I get to be dramatic and hopeless, and you turn off the TV feeling worse than when you found me. But that's not this show. I don't do despair as a content strategy. But here's what happened when I actually thought about it instead of just feeling about it. The theory that scared me is the exact same theory that tells you how to win. If the other side is big, organized, and reliable, there's exactly one thing that beats it something bigger. That's the whole secret, I know, called the Nobel Prize people. But you'd be amazed how much politics forgets it. You cannot beat a large coalition with a small one, an organized one with a cranky one, a broad one with a narrow one. And the big one, you cannot beat a reliable coalition with a purity coalition. The status quo is like a big chain store, open every day, same hours always stocked, boring as drywall, but open when you need it. The Purity Movement is the pop-up restaurant run by a genius who serves eleven people on nights he feels inspired and yells at you if you order it wrong. The food might be incredible, but you cannot outcompete a chain with a place that's closed indefinitely due to creative differences. So the answer, and I'll say this a few times tonight because it's the whole ball game, is not a perfect candidate. The answer is a bigger coalition. And this is where the whole reason this show exists walks on stage. You've heard me say common sense is the big tent. And I don't say it because it fits on a hat. I say it because of the math I just showed you. Most Americans agree on way more than they disagree on. Streets that work, schools that teach, groceries you can afford, a city that isn't on fire, a government that does the basic job without a TED talk about it. But politics doesn't get rich off the boring 80. It makes its money on the loudest, angriest, most tribal 20, the all-you-can-eat buffet of outrage that somehow leaves you hungrier. And while everybody fights over the emotional 20, the boring 80, which is where the votes are, gets ignored. That's the whole bet of this show. Meet at our agreements, live in the 80, let the purity testers wrestle in the mud over the 20. And as it turns out, that's not just nicer, it's the only math that wins. Now I've got to turn the camera on our own side, because we're the only we are world class at the thing that loses. The change movement finally gets some energy. Some new folks walk through the tent flap, and what do we do? We card ⁓ at the door. ⁓ you're frustrated with the cost of living? Great. Quick quiz. What's your position on these nine other things I've decided are the real test? Trans abortion, Christianity. Get one wrong, and out you go, back into the cold. We've got a guy who agrees with us 80% of the way, and we throw him out over 20% like he insulted your mother. You know what that is? That's doing the status quo's job for them. The machine doesn't even have to fight you. You're shrinking your own army on your own time for free. It's the only business plan on earth where the strategy is fewer customers. Coalition building isn't a velvet rope at a nightclub. It's a barn raising. You don't ask the guy with the hammer about his voting record, you say great. North Wall's over there. So here's my morning with love. If you spend all your energy fighting people who already mostly agree with you, you're not a warrior, you're a volunteer for the other side. Make it concrete with Bianco. The losing move is everybody fighting over whether his voters are the right kind. To this, to that, he says it. Just stop. Those voters aren't a problem to litigate. They're November inventory. Real people who already raised their hand and said, I want something different. You don't stand in your own store yelling at the merchandise. You say, glad you're here. Let's talk. Every coalition that ever won anything started by adding, not subtracting. The answer is not a purer base, it's a bigger one. Let's do the math in front of the actual frontrunner. And I'm not running a campaign ad, I'm using him as a worked example. Hilton led the primary. Fine. But leading a primary in California and winning a general are two different planets. Here's the cold part. He cannot win with the Republicans alone. There just aren't enough. It's just the truth. He can't win with the already angry, already onboard crowd either. They're great. They're not a majority. No amount of yelling makes them one. The path requires independents, moderates, reform-minded Democrats who are quietly exhausted, working families watching the rent eat the paycheck, small business owners drowning in forms, frustrated renters, and yes, the change-hungry pool we fought tonight. That's not one kind of voter. That's a tent with a lot. Different folding chairs in it. And the only way it works is if the candidate spends more time opening the flap than checking IDs. And before you tell me that's a fantasy, it's not. People have done this in hard places against the odds. We'll get to the best example in a second. But the lesson under all of it is one sentence wearing different jackets. Winning coalitions expand, losing coalitions contract. The winners spend their energy on the people they don't have yet, the losers spend it purifying the people they already had. One of those grows, the other slowly disappears while feeling extremely righteous about it. So one more time, clean, no jokes. The answer is not a perfect candidate, the answer is a bigger coalition. There is no flawless messenger riding in on a horse. There is no horse. And you will wait for that guy forever while the machine wins every year you spend waiting. The status quo isn't banking on your finding a savior, it's banking on you holding out for one. Because while you wait for perfect, They show up with good enough and an organized turnout list. And here's exactly what changed my mind about the whole thing. I started the night thinking the problem was too many Californians are locked into the status quo. But that's not the problem. The frustration is real the Pratt flair, the Bianco inventory, three and five LA voters reaching for a different door. The change side isn't small. It might even be bigger. So the problem was never not enough people that want change. The problem is the people who want change haven't learned how to work together yet. There are a thousand individuals with a thousand grievances, each one furious in his own truck at 6 a.m. alone. That's not a coalition, that's a big crowd all facing different directions. And that is a completely different problem than we're doomed. See, we're doomed has no solution. We haven't organized yet is a to-do list. Steve Hilton should take notes. One you mourn, the other you fix. And I'd a whole lot rather have a to-do list than a funeral. So maybe California isn't stuck. Maybe we've just been walking up to the problem from the wrong side this whole time. Now, if all that's true, if the win is the addition, the bigger tent finally getting the change side pointed in the same direction, then it turns out this isn't even a new idea. It's a real old one we just forgot. And there's a guy I talk about a lot who figured out this exact same thing in this exact state a long time ago. That brings me to tonight's Reagan reminder. Let's go back to 1966. The California Republican Party was a wreck. They'd just torn into each other to shreds. The 64 party fight had left the whole party bleeding in the street. And into that mess walks a former actor and a recent party switcher, and his own side went after him, called him an extremist, called him emotionally upset. Hinted that Reagan was unstable. His own team, before the other side landed, a single punch, and the state party chairman, a fellow named Gaylord Parkinson, looked at all that friendly fire and said, Enough. He wrote a rule, the eleventh commandment, thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republican. Reagan didn't invent that line, let's be honest. Parkinson did. But Reagan grabbed it, lived by it, and made it famous. He just refused to trash his own side, took the high road while they threw rocks, and the rocks bounced off. The attacks backfired, the party stopped eating itself. And then Reagan went and did the other thing. He didn't stop at his voters. He went and got frustrated Democrats, tired suburbanites, people who weren't supposed to be his, and he beat a sitting governor in deep blue California in a landslide. Stopped the infighting, build the bigger tent. That's not a slogan. It's a winning California campaign that actually happened on these exact rules. The playbook's been on the shelf for 60 years. We just kept reaching past it to pick a fight with the guy next to us. So here's what I'm asking, and it's not to go vote. I mean, obviously vote, but voting's the last five minutes of the job that takes months. I'm asking for something harder. Add somebody. This week, one person, the neighbor who's not political but won't stop complaining about the rent. The independent at work who rolls their eyes at both teams, the cousin who agrees with you 80%, and you've been freezing out over the 20. Don't quiz them. Open the flap, pull up a chair. Stop treating politics like a team you yell for and start treating it like a thing you build. Because remember what we found tonight. The people who want change aren't too few. They're just scattered. A thousand frustrated folks, each facing different directions. Crowd becomes a coalition the second someone turns around and says to the guy next to him, Hey, you two, come on over. That's the whole job. Not a perfect candidate, a bigger coalition. The answer was never a savior. The answer is each other. Now look, I told you up top, I think I learned something this week, and I've got to be straight. I'm not a hundred percent sure I'm right. This is a new theory I cooked up overnight in the snack coma, talking to my own living room. That's not exactly peer review. So I want your eyes on it. Am I crazy? Am I on to something? Have you noticed this too in your town, your industry, your own family? You tell me. Call or text 252 Chad Law. Tell me where I nailed it. Tell me where I blew it, especially where I blew it. Those are my favorite calls. We're on Rumble X, Instagram, and Substack, and the algorithm would be thrilled if this quietly disappeared. So if you see us, share us. Because that's the bet this whole show is built on. Turn the noise down. Put a little class and consistency back into this thing. Meet at the agreements, build the bigger tent. I'm Chad Law, the last gay conservative, America's binary brother, the common sense extremist living in radical reality, the holiest homo in conservative media, still undefeated and still unopposed. We'll be right back for the post show to take your questions on Rumble. But the main show go add somebody to your list. And this, America, was Common Sense.