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The Loyalty Trap: Inside the 2024 Biden-Harris Collapse
00:37:06
Josh Dawsey joins to discuss 2024: How Donald Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America, digging into Kamala Harris’s campaign missteps, Biden’s loyalty hangups, and Hunter’s oversized influence. In the Spiel, a...
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- [00:00]
Unknown Speaker
Foreign.
- [00:04]
Mike Pesca
It's Wednesday, July 9, 2025 from Peach Fish Productions. It's the gist. I'm Mike Pesca and I probably, like you, have been very bothered by the news coming out of Kerr County, Texas. What they didn't do to warn themselves. But also of course, the death toll. The governor of Texas, Greg Abbott indicating that 160 people were are still missing. When you hear about the missing in a flood, this is not people trapped under a building. You think they're dead. You can't survive underwater. You can't even survive or why would you survive if you were washed away by the waters but stuck somewhere else, maybe one or two people could. So the mind I think probably goes, I don't know, maybe some people say, well, 160 dead, that maybe means many of them are alive. There's hope. But another group of people might go, I think a bit more logically just based on what we know about floods, that those 160 are not going to have been proved to survive. However, do you have to caution you or perhaps console you that in disasters, not only is there a lot of unknowns and bad information get spread out, but especially with missing people, in the type of disaster that we're talking about, where death comes quickly, there is very often misreporting about the number of missing because the people who are missing are not missing to themselves. Their whereabouts just might not be known to loved ones. And as a case in point, let us take the Maui wildfires. I'll quote from an article in Big island now from August 22nd. So just with just a couple of days after the wildfires, 115 people confirmed dead with 850 still accounted for. And these numbers, the 850 that was quoted by officials. Boston Globe, Maui confronts challenge of finding more than 800 missing people after the deadly wildfires. NBC list of possible unaccounted for now 1000-1100. Do you know what the final death toll? Horrible. Way too high death toll in Maui was of the 115 confirmed dead and maybe a thousand. Final death toll was 102. There are two people who are still listed as missing and their families want them to be counted as dead. But they're both homeless individuals and they weren't even seen more than a month before the wildfires in Maui. But of course, fires behave very differently from floods and once a fire sweeps through an area, what left behind is smoldering for a while. But it's also stagnant. It's right there. The rivers rush on and with them bodies perhaps yet to be found under trees in other estuaries. Who knows where. I've been reading a lot of obituaries of the dead and accounts of the missing in the Houston Chronicle and there are many instances where let's say a family of four was camping and three of the family are confirmed dead and one of them, the father, can't be found. So that's a missing person that will almost certainly be found to be deceased. That will not end well. And a couple, maybe they were calling their loved ones panicking, rightly so, about the onrushing waters. They called at 4am hadn't been heard from. One of the two of them has been found again. I would assume that the other one is gone. A lot of this not only is there a difference in fires and flood, but a lot of what went on in Hawaii was based on very unrigod definition of who was counted as a victim or among the missing to begin with. And I don't know what's going on in Texas. So there will be a rise in the death toll. I would not assume it will be a rise to 15. Again, I don't know if it's a consolation or a clarification. I'm further unsure if it is consoling to you. I know for me that when I can get clarity, when I could get some facts and information and context on any of these issues, I appreciate it. So there's another issue or problem, I guess you could say that I have been having or experiencing with accounting of why those in Texas, mostly in Kerr county, died in the floods. And it is an analysis of the hundred year and five hundred year flood zone and rainfall tabulations. I've done a lot of research into these tables and I am eager to share it with you so I could get it off my plat and off my chest. And that will occur in the spiel. But first, we are joined once again by Josh Dossey. He is the author of the book or one of the co authors, 2024 how Trump retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America. There was a lot on that last part up until the time Joe Biden got out of the race in our last episode and we'll start up from there. You probably remember 2024 wasn't that long ago, but though the scars may still be fresh. Josh Dossey, are you buried under nonstop meetings and something important happens and you forgot? Wait, what was discussed? 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Go to quince.com the gist for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. That's Q-U-I-N C E.com/the gist to get free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com/the gist. We're back with Josh Dossey. He is the author of 2024 How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America. And yesterday we were talking about the transition, the forced transition from Joe Biden to Kamala Harris. And of course, it is true that Kamala Harris had so many challenges, challenges of timing, challenges of just a compressed election. But I wanted to ask Josh, so guess what? I did that as tough a situation as Harris found herself in, did his reporting show that there were a number of choices that could have been made that weren't by Harris and her team that really could have affected the election? Is there a strong indication there were messages out there or policy positions to take or anything else where, if she had taken them, even given the headwinds, things might have turned out very differently?
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Josh Dawsey
Well, I think the biggest decision was what to do about Biden. And she did not want to draw any distance from Biden, who was unpopular broadly, who had had to leave the ballot. She was still his active vice president. So her staff wrote a series of memos where they sort of delineated ways they believed she could gently break with Biden and his policies and try and say something a little different. One on the Israel, the war. Israel, Gaza war. The Democratic Party was very upset. A lot of the base was very upset at how Biden had handled that. And they wanted her to say things differently. A number of his policies they believed were sort of an albatross on the campaign. And so one of the things we have in the book, the Kamala Harris people really saw getting sort of moderate Republican, establishment Republican, sort of Liz Cheney type voters to come vote for her as the key to winning. They knew they had to get these votes and they hired a longtime Republican consultant Who kind of left the party over Trump to help them come up with messages.
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Unknown Speaker
Right.
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Josh Dawsey
And this woman, Maria Kamela, gave memo after memo after memo to Jenna Malley Dillon saying, you've got to break what Biden and all of these things. So Republicans to senator, to moderate voters, he's just toxic. He's got to make some changes. And Harris wouldn't do it. And what she would say to folks privately was, A, she and Biden, I think, genuinely had a pretty decent human relationship, and B, she was sitting vice president, and C, she believed if she tried to break with him while staying in the administration, it would not look genuine and that people would then say she was a fake person and that she was all sorts of other reasons. In her mind, she felt like she couldn't. And Biden even encouraged her not to break from him. That's one of the things we have in the book. Biden directly told her, you know, I don't want you to break from me. But what she was sort of, by not doing that, by not breaking with Biden, you know, it was hard to get any sort of distance and make her her own candidate.
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Unknown Speaker
Right.
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Josh Dawsey
The other thing that was really interesting we found was, you know, the Trump folks at the end of the campaign really went after her on comments she had made in the past, you know, about trans inmates, folks in prisons, Canada, that she made during the 29th, comment she made during the 2019, the primary.
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Unknown Speaker
Right.
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Josh Dawsey
And with Trump folks over and over, they made that into sort of a viral ad, sort of talked about it almost at every rally. And her team wrote out some answers for her that they viewed as more moderate on that issue and wanted her to give them, and she never did.
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Unknown Speaker
Right.
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Josh Dawsey
And it was one of those decisions I think she also made personally. And she didn't want. She didn't maybe want to do that. But there were folks warning her, you know, we've got some problems here.
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Mike Pesca
Yeah. Oh, I understand. It's a tough choice. I mean, she's right. She's not. It's not political naivete to say it's going to seem not genuine. And she knows she'd be the person who would know if it's genuine or not genuine. What she's saying is, I don't really believe that, and that will scan. It's a tough situation. But it also points out that a lot of Team Biden's and a lot of Team Biden's instinct or way of navigating the political world, from your reporting, other reporting, it seems like he and the team Collected slights and personal loyalty was almost too important. And you could make the argument that.
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Josh Dawsey
Funny that you say that because Tyler Pager, my co author, was just saying the other night that his takeaway from reporting out this whole book was just all of the personal ways that Biden's people had collected slides like that was the thing that in the totality of the reporting came across more than the day.
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Mike Pesca
Because even if Biden and Obama had this warm relationship, which everything indicates it does, the two principles, man did the Biden people. We knew this existed to some extent. But I just think of in terms of not seeing the forest from the trees. Barack Obama walks into a room of Democrats and there's like 999 of them would be thrilled. And the one who's not is the guy who, who worked closest with Biden. It was a negative indicator of affection for Barack Obama. Not that Barack Obama is without, with, without criticism. You even have this one throwaway line in the book that I didn't see elsewhere. Obama had not watched the debate live. Really like he has other things to do. Barack Obama, this, this is, it seemed a little aloof. What was his explanation for that?
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Josh Dawsey
Obama, I think had a very clear eyed view from him being his VI vice president, what Biden's strengths and weaknesses were.
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Unknown Speaker
Right.
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Josh Dawsey
And he had warned Biden against running in the past. He believed Biden was not always the most effective speaker. He did not think he was running a good campaign. He said that to his staff on multiple occasions. And yet he also, Obama had personal affection for Biden and really liked the guy, I think on some levels.
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Unknown Speaker
Right.
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Josh Dawsey
And so I think he was sort of torn on how to handle the campaign because it wasn't that he had dripping animosity towards Biden, it was just that he knew what Biden's weaknesses were probably better than anyone else.
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Unknown Speaker
Right.
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Josh Dawsey
And the night of a debate that you mentioned, if you notice, Biden's team really quickly understood how badly it went. And so they called Obama and got Obama to put out a statement or called Obama's team to say, we all have bad debate nights. I have faith in Joe. And they viewed that as a critical thing they needed to have happen to save sort of his candidacy.
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Unknown Speaker
Right.
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Josh Dawsey
Like Obama at that moment had to throw him a bone, so to speak.
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Unknown Speaker
Right.
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Josh Dawsey
And he did. But Obama was pretty clear eyed. I mean, we talked to several people around, you know, the former president, former President Obama. Obama was pretty clear eyed throughout the process that he had a. Biden had a really uphill path to Winning. And a lot of, you know, it's funny, like, everything. Hindsight's 20 20, and when books are written and there's time passes, you know, everyone is, like, a little bit more honest about, I think, what they were really thinking in real time. But in 2022 and 2023, much of the Democratic Party did not think Biden should run again. But as long as a sitting president was staying in the race and said that he was going to win, no one wanted to be the person to put their hand up and say, I don't think that's a good idea. Because he had the apparatus of a dnc. He, again, was a sitting President of the United States and he could whack people down. I mean, you saw what happened to one candidate, Dean Phillips, who ran against him in the primary and said he was too old. Biden's team just eviscerated him. They changed all the rules. They, you know, went after him in sort of really personal ways, and he didn't get anywhere.
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Unknown Speaker
Right.
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Josh Dawsey
So a lot of the collective thinking of the Democratic Party in that early period was Biden probably wouldn't be the best candidate. But as long as Biden was staying in, people like Obama were basically staying quiet, at least publicly.
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Mike Pesca
Yeah. So I did mention Hunter Biden. He's all over the book. And how he shows up in politics is that Democrats will push back because we're so polarized. U.S. democrats will push back on the Republican insinuation that he's in the middle of corruption and illegality. That touches Joe Biden. So that's not proven, and it doesn't seem it's true. I will say, having interviewed a lot of the principals involved, however underappreciated, though, if you read your book and some of the other ones, Hunter Biden and his travails are really at the center of so many of Biden. Joe Biden's bad decisions. Hunter Biden has a big impact, and it's not a criminal impact, but it does, I think, speak to judgment. He's showing up on zoom calls advising the president what to do after his bad debate. He's a key adviser, and I think all indications are that he shouldn't be. He's a very poor judge of these things. But am I. I don't want to just write the guy off because he has a history of drug addiction, but it also seems he did not serve Joe Biden well. His advice, his presence, just.
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Josh Dawsey
I think one of our findings, frankly, was that he helped derail his father's reelection I mean, June 2024, the month of the sort of disastrous debate. It was a big month for Biden. He was going overseas. He was having this fundraiser with George Clooney, and he was just obsessed about his son's trial. I mean, we quote him telling a close friend in the book, the only thing I care about is my son not getting convicted right now. He was offering to Biden's, Hunter Biden's lawyers, I want to testify. I want to go on the stand as a sitting President of the United States and testify on behalf of my son.
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Unknown Speaker
Right?
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Josh Dawsey
And the lawyers were like, we probably actually don't think that's a good idea. He, you know, was calling in, as you said, White House aides would be on a call, and they would hear a voice come over the call, and it would be Hunter Biden telling his father, you know, what he thought he should do on various fronts, particularly when it came to taking on Trump. He was around just a remarkable, remarkable amount. And what the Biden aide sort of realized is that he was untouchable. Biden did not want to talk about his son's legal problems. In fact, he would often shut down conversations about them. He didn't want to talk about his family problems. He would shut down conversations about them. And we wrote a lot in the first term about the role that Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump had in the White House. Bringing family right into the core circle of the White House, giving them big jobs, changing the dynamics of how the White House works. That happened to a large degree here, too. Hunter Biden didn't have an office in the West Wing, but he was someone who was constantly on his father's speed dial. And, you know, the human nature of it, right, is that Biden lost his other son, Beau, to cancer. And Biden has lived kind of a really sad life of tragedy. I mean, over the years, the family, family, things that have happened to him. And I think. Think if you talk to Biden's allies and defenders, they would say he was so concerned about Hunter relapsing. They finally had gotten Hunter sort of sober. Hunter was off drugs. Hunter was doing well. And then he was having all these criminal cases come up. And Biden privately believed that he was responsible for all of these cases. But if he was not President of the United States or at least partially responsible, these prosecutors wouldn't be interested in all of these older charges. They would not be going through Hunter's tax returns and his gun returns and, you know, the drug paraphernalia and xyz that the Hunter Biden had become.
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Mike Pesca
Yeah, to be fair, like, I think that, well, he avoided taxes, but at least the gun charge was unprecedented. It's a charge, it's on the books. Just no one besides Hunter Biden charged with it.
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Josh Dawsey
He did illegal things. I'm not saying it was okay that he did anything illegal. I'm just saying in Biden's mind, he thought that they were interested in his son because of him.
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Unknown Speaker
Right.
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Josh Dawsey
And so he felt protective of his son and I think, you know, was going to extraordinary levels to try and manage his son's crisis. I mean, it was a crisis. I mean, his son, you know, there was all sorts of evidence that came out that was just, you know, pretty dismaying for the family of drug paraphernalia and sex tapes and, you know, people witnessing all sorts of different things. And, you know, the emails that came out, his son's business dealings in China and Ukraine and all over.
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Unknown Speaker
Right.
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Josh Dawsey
There was a lot, was a lot swirling there. And I think he was just so protective or trying to be protective of his son.
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Unknown Speaker
Right.
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Josh Dawsey
And I think it led to a deleterious impact on the presidency and his campaign. There's just no doubt. If you talk to the people around him, they say the hardest thing that Biden had to deal with was his son's problems.
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Mike Pesca
So let me ask you a couple more questions, just things out of curiosity that I have. One is the democracy is on the ballot message. It's true. Those subjective, subjective statement. There's a lot of truth to it. It's pressing and it didn't move any of the voters that Biden and Harris needed it to move, and it was clear that it wasn't. I'll be honest. If I was in their position, I, I, it would have been very tempting of me to say it. You know, you get plaudits. You're saying a true thing. Why am I in politics if I don't raise the specter of this whole thing could go away if we make the wrong choice. But do you have any insight or reporting that shows if there was a debate about that or how much to emphasize that democracy is on the ballot point There was. There wasn't a winner.
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Josh Dawsey
There were, there were aides to Kamala Harris who were doing everything they could to convince her core team not to have the final speech on the Ellipse and make it about Jan6. Right. And to do something else besides that in the book, we would put that out and that she wanted to do that. I think on the Biden front Biden's people like Donilon McDonald, Steve Ruschetti, and Biden himself, in consultation with Jon Meacham, sort of a famous historian and author, who Biden relied on, just believe to their core that the democracy message that their calculation was that Americans realized how bad what Trump had done was on J6 and gone too far. And that people, even if they wouldn't necessarily say it out loud, they knew something was just off with that.
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Unknown Speaker
Right.
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Josh Dawsey
And they believed that Harris people made it a message, a key message as well. I mean, I will say when we were down the stretch of the campaign and they did the LIPS rally and they were talking about J Sick Trump's aides in live time, I mean, I remember getting the text and talking to them were gleeful. They were like, can we pay for her to do it again tomorrow night?
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Unknown Speaker
Right.
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Josh Dawsey
Their message was just about, like, inflation and immigration and like, prices. And they actually got nervous. Trump's team got nervous when she started talking about abortion more because they believe they actually had women there who could be peeled away. And when she would do abortion events, you would see a certain concern that they never had. I mean, there was a call I did with someone senior in Trump's orbit Probably in mid October 2024, and the person said to me, like, we were just speaking sort of, you know, on background, not for story. He said, do you understand what they're doing? And I said, I don't know. What do you mean, like, other sides doing? They said, we just don't see anything in our numbers of what they're doing makes sense. It just doesn't make sense to us. Like, is there something that we're not seeing? I mean, I think they genuinely, the Trump folks were genuinely sort of like, why are they doing this? They're not winning any votes. We're being more effective. And I think it was a curious decision. I mean, I think the thing that you said that was powerful really, or important is like, they really believed democracy was on the ballot.
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Unknown Speaker
Right.
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Josh Dawsey
And I think they wanted to say that, but that was not the message that was clearly motivating the electorate.
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Mike Pesca
Yeah. And also as a point of analysis, Mike Donilon is a guy who has won campaigns with Joe Biden based on slogans that didn't test well or at all, who had arguments of the case that the numbers didn't pick up as working. But he did win an election. So he's the kind of guy who says, nope, I believe it. I'm going with my gut. That's one thing and another thing is, you know, I'm sure people will listen, who are listening to this will say that I'm bending over backwards to give compliments to Biden and Harris. But, you know, in these contexts, it helps to be amoral. And I think maybe their deep sense of moral commitment on this issue didn't serve them well in the political context. That's the kindest or most generous reading of it.
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Josh Dawsey
And I usually think Trump's campaign was a shrewdly cynical one. I mean, I'm sitting here, my computer, I was looking through this memos for reporting, and there was a memo we got from a source that said how a national abortion policy will cost Trump the election. And the whole presentation that is in here has nothing to do with whether or not how you believe on abortion. It literally says bottom line. And they're in all caps, red font. I don't know if your viewers can say declaring any number of weeks would play directly into Joe Biden's hands on his simplest path to electoral victory. And then it was just a polling presentation on abortion in the states. Right. And so on abortion, on early voting.
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Unknown Speaker
Right.
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Josh Dawsey
Trump did not believe in early voting. He said it was all fraudulent. It should be all pa. Her balance. Yeah, they convinced him.
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Mike Pesca
And Susie Wilds realized how bad that was and spent all her time trying to convince him.
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Josh Dawsey
Right. They convinced him through a bunch of memos to just make these tapes. He didn't even want to make these tapes. What he would tell the donors, he would tell donors basically on their issues, whatever they sort of wanted to hear in these events. Right. He made a series of very, you know, shrewd sort of choices, I must say, to win this campaign.
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Mike Pesca
Very good, very insightful. The name of the book is 2024 How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America. I've been speaking to one of the three authors, Josh Dawsey. Josh, thanks so much.
- [28:51]
Josh Dawsey
Thank you.
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Mike Pesca
And now the spiel you hear on the news in relation to Kerr county or many a natural disaster, the emphasis. And these floods were only supposed to have taken place once every hundred years. Or this is a 500 year rainfall event and it's happening more and more. I have said and acknowledged versions of this with different stories of flood, natural disaster or rainfall, because it sure seems, and it is that all these hundred year and five hundred year events are happening every couple of years. And it's not just me saying it or the news, though the news does like to emphasize the numbers, much like they say billions, always with the Big. So the news does like to emphasize, I can't believe how often these things are happening and they are happening more. It's not just the news, it's the sometimes we hope the scientists informing the news. I'll read you from a Princeton Engineering Study, 100 year floods will happen once every 30 years according to new flood maps. Okay, that's not exactly what the study said, but it wasn't great. It said in the Gulf of Mexico it could happen on average instead of once every 100 years, once every 16.4 years in counties in the Atlantic coast, once every 8.3 years. And what they're really doing is they're saying this has a 1% chance of happening or in case of a 30 year event, a 3%, roughly 3% chance of happening. That's not good. It's all not good. Now those are coastal counties and they're a little bit easier to model from what I understand, but also more affected by storm change and sea level rise and things that might not affect an inland county like Kerr County, Texas. However, we are hearing, and it is true that this is something like a hundred year event, even though we're talking about flash flood alley. However, I was thinking hard about this and you know, I like to do a segment called I was wrong. I don't think that I was wrong. This is not me being defensive. In fact, it's the opposite. If you'll. I think my inclination was to quickly go for the explanation that scientists are giving that these are, these events are happening more often and the explanation is valid. There's more energy in the system, there's more wetness in the system. More wetness causes more water. And a couple of days ago I talked about this and I like it when they do a real thorough assessment years after the fact. And they found that Hurricane Harvey, horrible flood in Texas, 15 to 20% of that was caused by or exacerbated by the weather. And I think the number for the European floods that swept through Hungary and other European countries are even higher. However, just the heuristic or just the easily grasped for phrase or idea. Oh, these seem to be getting more common even when augmented with the scientific studies that I read. There's something bothering me about it. And then I began to thinking about the lottery. Now in the lottery, when you play the lottery, you're probably not going to win, but someone wins. Even though the chance of winning the lottery might be 15 million to 1. It's also true that every day someone wins the lottery, maybe not the big lottery or whatever lottery there is in your state. But there's a list of lotteries and there are many winners every day. And many of those winners, all of those winners in the big million dollar lotteries beat million to one odds. Because when we select for the group, it's sort of a survivor's bias. When we select for the group that actually does the statistically improbable thing, it's easy to convince ourselves that the statistically improbable thing is a lot more probable than thought. Complicating this all again with the area of 100 year and 500 year rainfall and floods is it is getting more probable than we thought. As the Princeton engineers and other scientists have documented. However, it's not getting all that much more probable. Or maybe a better way to look at it is, yeah, we and the insurance companies are leading the way on this. Need to recalibrate our numbers. However, we don't need to throw out our numbers and we don't think that they're all useless because of the strong emotional anecdotal evidence that there are so many events that are said to be 100 year events. Yeah, we only talk about them on the news when they're outliers. So what? I did way too much research on this. I became friends with the national oceanic and Atmospheric Weather Service Hydro Meteorological Design Study center, the Precipitation Frequency Data Server. You could search for a whole bunch of places and I did. But to try to make this as fair as possible, what I really wanted to do was see if there were any big studies where they looked at all the maps over the last hundred years and found out how many times has the rainfall actually surpassed those predicted hundred year levels. There were some interesting studies out there. So a guy named Leathers, or maybe a woman, I'm going to say women. A lot of women in science. Leathers at al looked at Delaware and compared essentially the accuracy of the average estimated prediction and, and found that for 5 to 24 minute storms things were pretty on track. But when it took into account 6 for 24 hour storms how much rain fell in that time period, the atlas that the national oceanic and Atmospheric association uses systematically underestimated both the frequency and the magnitude. Then there were of course the six forested headwater catchments across the US Study. They found kind of a mixed bag that at high elevations the atlas did underestimate, but at low gradient coastal forests it might have overstated the risk. Some of the other studies showed that the Atlas 14 values are increasingly out of date with the hundred Year depth already being exceeded three or four times more often than nominal in many regions. Many regions. So maybe that 100 year is a 25 year figure. National radar gauge hybrid studies by Right et al. They used radar, which is not only impressive but an acronym and a palindrome that exceedances meaning. Oh, that happened more than once every hundred years have doubled to quintupled since 1950s. The risk is being understated. Not satisfied with leathers at al.
- [35:28]
Josh Dawsey
At al.
- [35:30]
Mike Pesca
I did my own study. So I asked my old friend Chat GPT. Now if you think I was friends with the N O A, A Hydra Meteorological design study Center. CHAT GPT is. It's more. It's more of a charm. We have a, you know, definitely love hate relationship. It's way too complimentary. And I'm always dinging it for using phrases like you ask a powerful question. My mic. No, it's just a question. You back off or finding flaws and then it says you are right to point this out. I'm like, no, you are wrong to make the mistake. I could be a little meaner with it than I can some of the employees who I'm never mean to. So I said to my old friend Chad, give me four random places. Give me a random survey of stations within the National Weather Service Cooperative Observer Program, the coop. They've been keeping stats for years, thousands of places. Give me four of them. And it spit out Bellingham, Washington, Alamosa, Colorado, Paducah, Kentucky, Bar Harbor, Maine. I think I've been to two or three of them. Pretty proud of myself. Definitely not Alamosa. And then I went and found the charts what the hundred year, 500 year rain totals would be. And so let's start with Bellingham, Washington. In Bellingham, the 100 year rain event will constitute six and a half inches. And the 500 year rain event would be eight and a half inches. But do you want to know what the max observed rain was in Bellingham? Three and a half inches. That was in 1976, so it didn't get there. Next on to Paducah. In Paducah in 1985, I think you remember this wet day if you were in paducah, it rained seven and a half inches. And wouldn't you know that was 40 years ago. Wouldn't you know that the hundred year threshold for the 24 hour event was 7.49 inches? Isn't that crazy? No, not really. It's just a statistical anomaly. And then before that, just a couple years ago in 2023, it was 7 inches. 6.2 inches happened in 89 and then before that in 1928. That's just again another data point. It does seem that Paducah hit its hundred year threshold 40 years ago and actually exceeded its 50 year threshold if you look at that even its 25 year threshold two years ago. So it does seem a little more rainy than the charts would have accurately predicted. In Paducah we go to Alamosa, which is an arid place in Colorado and it hasn't even gotten close. Doesn't rain much in Colorado, but the charts reflect that the hundred year 24 hour total was said to be once every hundred years. It rains not even 2 inches, 1.97 inches. But if you look at the last hundred years hasn't really gotten close. 1.77 inches in 1959, 1.56 inches in 1971. Is this exciting me reading 80 year old weather totals 1.5 inches in July of 1939. So remember to pack your slickers if you're an octogenarian going back in a time machine. Bar Harbor, Maine was the last one I looked up. 7.61 inches occurred in 2008. That was the most they ever got and that does exceed the 100 year threshold. But in a couple of them they didn't. In one of them it hit it right? Exactly. And that was 40 years ago. So. So to summarize, in Paducah 40 years ago it hit the 100 year threshold. In Alamosa it didn't come close. In Bellingham it didn't come close. And in Bar Harbor, 7.61 inches when the 100 year threshold was said to be 7.42. The point is, and I hope I haven't bored you terribly but believe me, not as much as I was, I'm not going to say tortured, but I have a love hate relate. Did I say love hate with Chad GPT. I think I have a hate, hate hate love relationship with the Hydro Meteorological Design Studies Center. And all that hate is because of there are a lot of graphs and seems to have been built in like 1987 back when it was raining a little in Paducah and it doesn't quite have all the weather statistics at my fingertip. But I did found out, but I did find out that you can't just go by the anecdote of well that hasn't happened in 100 years. But I also found out that, that we really do need to recalibrate the charts. Not just the hundred year charts but the hydrometeorological design studies interface and a little bit of the obsequious chatgpt. And that's it for today's show. Corey War is the producer of the Gist and Astra Green runs our social media. And Kathleen Sykes, she does the gist list at the and Ashley Khan, she's the production coordinator. And Michelle Pesca, she does it all. Plus always shaking that magic eight ball to try to get what she wants. Leo Baums, the intern who Peru G Peru Dupre thanks for listening.
- [40:24]
Unknown Speaker
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