Elliot Einstein
 | |
| Era | Tweeter Is Not Real Life (cast) |
|---|---|
| Age | 55-65 |
| Home | New York, NY |
| Demographic | mathematician-podcaster, white, heterodox |
| Lean | Swing voter |
| Race | white |
He is a mathematician from New York who became an economist and podcaster. He argues that science, the universities and the state stopped producing real progress around 1970, and he belongs to no political party, although both parties court him.
Who they stand for
He stands for the tech right, a group of high-earning, highly educated sceptics. This includes people in finance and technology, engineers and academics who have grown distant from their own institutions. This group coalesced around the heterodox podcast circuit of 2017 and 2018, and it believes that the American institutions that built the postwar world have been taken over by a careerist class. The Covid-19 pandemic pushed the group toward anti-establishment politics on both the left and the right. In the 2024 election, much of Silicon Valley's money and commentary supported Donald Trump for the first time, drawn by his promises on deregulation, cryptocurrency and dismantling federal agencies. The group is mostly rich, male and based on the coasts, and it tends to vote for whichever candidate seems more likely to let it build new things.
He differs from Brian Einstein because he cares more about markets and research funding than about biology. He differs from Simon Harrisson because he refuses to settle back into ordinary liberal politics. Among the cast, he is the clearest example of a genuine swing voter, and he is aware of this himself.
Playing to them
He supports ambitious projects such as nuclear power, a research agency freed from peer review, high-skilled immigration, light-touch rules for digital assets, and a public fight with the university establishment. Either party can win him this way, and he rewards whichever one does. He opposes a president who defers to federal agencies as a matter of routine, who allows technology platforms to be pressured by the government, or who dismisses an outsider's idea without a hearing. He treats caution presented as prudence as a form of stagnation.
Winning his support tends to cost the support of Hasan Radical, Viltch and Natalie Winner, who see him as a wealthy contrarian. It also costs Daniel Tetris, when the policy involves open contempt for expertise. It costs Cenk Ulusoy, because of his stance on cryptocurrency and its tax treatment. Brian Einstein, John Brogan and Mencius Moldrake tend to support the same things he does on the institutions, as does Simon Harrisson on the universities specifically.