What I Learned From The 2022 Midterms
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Hey there, listeners. Galen here. You have undoubtedly heard the news that the January 6th committee made four criminal referrals against former President Trump to the Department of Justice. And we plan to talk about both that and the full January 6th report when it comes out later this week. But in the meantime, today's episode is a little bit different. Here it is. Are you ready to talk? You ready? You don't really know what we're talking about, do you?

I have no idea what we're talking about. You in that mood that mode where you can look inward and outward? I don't know but I think we're gonna find out. That pause suggests no. All right hello and welcome to the 538 politics podcast. I'm Galen. Oh I'm Chadwick Matlin uh an editor of 538 also Galen Druk's editor with me to my left. It's your stalwart host Galen Druk. Hi Galen. Hi Chad thanks for having me today. Galen what are we doing here today?

You are asking me questions because it's the end of the year and you are asking me to reflect on the year that we just covered on the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast for a change. Even when you're not hosting, you're still doing that setup language. It's incredible. I was going to do that, but you just did it. We are here, listeners, to reflect on the year that was the election that was really election cycle that was Gail and I have been talking about.

every week for what, six years, something like that? - Seven, Chad. This month is my seventh anniversary at FiveThirtyEight. - Incredible. And we figured that the reflections that we were doing privately actually maybe had some value to listeners and viewers as well. And so we thought we'd get in the podcast studio and really talk about this election cycle and whether it was different or not from past election cycles because in your conversations over the last six months or a year,

A lot of the conversations were about whether this midterm would be unique or not. I know you and Nate have some type of running gag about that as well. And what I really wanted to do as a sort of capper of the year and a capper of the cycle is figure out how your thinking has changed over the last seven years as you've been covering elections at FiveThirtyEight, because

Politics has changed, but I'm not sure whether or not your thinking has changed. So today's about you, Galen. About me? Finally. This podcast is always about the audience. We aim to serve. Wow. So on message. So on brand. Always on message. What an ambassador. All right. So let's talk about 2022 overall. Did something new happen this year in your estimation? Yeah. Yeah.

Because every year the country changes and every time we have an election, there's a new electorate voting.

And there are new circumstances, you know, the kind of inflation that we're experiencing, the kind of polarization that we're experiencing. Every time we enter one of these elections, we're going in as a brand new country in some ways, right? Obviously, our entire model here at FiveThirtyEight relies on the fact that you can use history to help determine what will happen in the future. Historical data, history broader than even just something that you can count. So, yes,

it was something brand new, but also I think there are reasons that we might have predicted it. So one thing that I've sort of been harping on throughout this year is that

There are such things as asterisk midterm elections, which is to say years during which the president's party doesn't actually lose House seats at the midterm. And the easiest ones to point to are, you know, 2002 and 1998. In both of those circumstances, the incumbent president had a 60 plus percent approval rating, not a.

high 30s, low 40s percent approval rating, which Biden had. So what are the circumstances in which you could have a president who actually isn't popular, but not really get punished? And I think there's a couple of things going on. But one of the things that might have led us in this direction is that we have seen increased polarization. And so even if you don't like Biden, you may hate

Or even if you don't hate, just dislike the alternative. And so that may not have been as much the case in 1998 or even 2002 when we were experiencing a rally around the flag effect. Is part of it as well about how much the leader of the party

is an emblem of the party as a whole. So at least with the Democratic messaging, Trump has been made to be the entire Republican Party. And we saw some Republicans try and run away from that this cycle. Is Biden the same kind of head of the party as Trump is made out to be for Republicans? Or rather, Republicans obviously make...

Biden out to be the head of the party. Does that message have the same valence given what we've seen around debates within the Democratic Party? No, in fact, I don't even think Republicans make Biden out to be necessarily the head of the Democratic Party. I mean, I think they try to spotlight the areas where his administration has failed or at least problems in the country that his administration has been unable to solve thus far.

But I think it's hard to do this empirically. To what extent is somebody seen, is a president seen as emblematic of their party?

One thing that I've looked to to try to compare to past experiences is under Trump, there was the resistance. Under Obama, there was the Tea Party. Under George W. Bush, there was a big backlash to the Iraq War. During Clinton's tenure, there was the Republican Revolution. So we have seen a very visible...

very negative response to past incumbent presidents, where people are literally out in the street voting against the person, organizing. You know, these grassroots campaign structures are built around dislike of an incumbent president. We weirdly haven't seen that for Biden, even though by every measure, there's a lot of discontent with the current state of affairs in America. Let's go, Brandon. Isn't that for you?

Well, I don't think it's really anywhere on par with the hashtag resistance and the Tea Party. And so I think part of it is there is a lack of excitement around

around Biden, I don't think Biden is seen as a sort of like existential threat to the Republican Party in the way Obama might have been seen. Because the way that we talked about Obama in the media was that this is the future of the Democratic Party and this is a rising majority that is going to be unbeatable. And if you were somebody who looked at that and said, I don't want to live in that country, like I don't agree with his policies, I don't agree with the ways that he talks about identity or whatever it may be, whatever he signifies for you,

There's a reason for you to get on the same applied for Trump. And you see advertisements were like, yeah, Biden ranked up there in terms of when we counted all of the money spent on advertising and what was the most money spent on the Republican side, on the Democratic side. Biden certainly wasn't number one. He was up there. And even whenever he was brought up.

Republican ads made sure to include people like Pelosi or AOC or the squad or things like that, because I don't think he is emblematic of the Democratic Party the way that past presidents have been emblematic of their parties. Well, or he's not emblematic of the fears that Republicans have of what the Democratic Party are. Right. I think part of what we

have shown on FiveThirtyEight is that the Biden coalition really did last into this election in some ways that we saw that within the Senate candidates overperforming expectation. And we have a piece coming out this week about that on the website. Well, because he won independence. Is that what you mean? Yeah. And when you look at the 2020 vote per precinct or per county, I guess it is versus 2022,

the performances are in line or higher within those Senate races, right? And so that suggests that there is a bedrock that carried over. And when you break it down by demographics within those counties, you can start to see some of those trends. I think to emphasize that even more for a second, and we talked about this with Carlos Odio about the Latino vote in 2022. When we calculate our

partisan scores of districts or states. We combine multiple elections across time to come to a number. We don't just rely on the last election because there is oftentimes a reversion to the mean. There are certain circumstances that exist in a singular election that may not carry over to the next election. I think we are still uniquely in a 2020 moment in terms of how the electorate divided up. Now, the electorate in 2022 was significantly different because there is lower turnout and

And, you know, the electorate is whiter, for example. It's better educated in a midterm year, those kinds of things. But it is – you look at the Rio Grande Valley. If you went off of our partisan score, you would not have done a very good job predicting how those elections turned out. Because according to our partisan score, Texas' 15th district, which is a border district, majority Hispanic district –

If you combine the results in 2018 and 2016 in order to get that partisan score, it looks like a Democratic district. But if you only look at 2020, it's a Trump plus four district and the Republican one. And so we are still very much in that sort of paradigm, at least at this moment. And I should say, and we've said this on the podcast before, that midterms don't predict 2024 outcomes. And, you know, at this point, it looks perhaps likely that there will be

I don't want to say likely. I don't want to get way out of my skis now that the mic has been turned over to me to say what I think. But it looks like there's a possible paradigm shift. And if Ron DeSantis or somebody else is the Republican nominee, I think a lot of these dynamics are up for debate. It's up for debate whether they will persist.

I think there is a lot of Trump- The leftover 2020 dynamics. I think there's a lot of Trump-specific stuff going on in terms of how the suburbs vote, in terms of how college-educated voters vote that I don't know if it would persist in a Ron DeSantis world. I'm curious about it. I don't have an answer. I think it will likely also depend on the legal troubles that are facing Trump and the various different investigations and sort of what his role is in the party come-

Oh, yeah. I don't mean what will happen in the Republican primary. I mean, if Rhonda Santos is actually at the top of the ticket in 2024, do the dynamics that we've seen of these upscale educated suburbs becoming something of almost a bedrock of the like resistance to.

the Trump Republican Party, does it stay that way? I don't think, I don't know. We're going to have to look at a lot of data in the coming year. But do people have this sort of like gut negative response to Ron DeSantis that they do to Trump? I don't think so. So you've talked a lot about how politics has changed over the last seven years. Do you think the way we, and the we there is probably the media as a whole, we can get into 538 in a second. Do you think that the media has changed the way it analyzes politics in the last seven years? Of course. Yeah.

I think that we, the media, et cetera, covered the 2016 election as something that was like an absolute spectacle. And it was a spectacle at times.

But I don't think we were like, OK, this person seems like they might flout democratic norms in a way that is like threatening to constitution or constitutional republic. You know, yeah, I hear what you're saying. That's the coverage of what's being said by the candidates, for example, and potentially the threat posed by them. I'm curious about the analysis of what's going to happen or what has happened.

Do you think that we are still in the media, essentially, that the way that the media tries to make sense of the American electorate is the same thing?

as it was pre-Trump? No, I think there's a lot more embrace of uncertainty, which I think is a good thing. We had a weird dynamic during the Obama years where the polls were really predictive and the coalition seemed pretty stable. And I think because that dynamic benefited Democrats, and there are a lot of liberals in academia and media,

There was reason for those people to celebrate the current electoral dynamics and say, hey, we got it, baby. Like, this is going to last. And so there was a sort of like wishful thinking on the part of a lot of the people analyzing this stuff saying, oh, there's this ascendant majority, which is it's relies that coalition still people may forget. We still relied heavily on non-college educated white voters.

but that sort of like the people who got the most attention were increasingly voters with a college degree and minority voters. You know, he had sort of sky high levels of turnout and approval amongst black and Latino voters for the Democratic Party. And

And so I think there was this idea that these coalitions are stable and we know the trends. People are becoming more educated. The country is becoming more diverse. Demographics has destiny. And demographics is destiny. Of course. And you're saying that the media bought into that. I think the media bought into that. And that's why they believe that Trump could never win. And that the version of the Democratic Party that Hillary Clinton was selling, where if you remember those stump speeches, a large portion of that speech was.

just shouting out every single perceived part of the democratic coalition that at the time democrats were thinking like we just need to keep these these these these these and these people pieced together and we'll keep our coalition intact and you know it was a very kind of front and center version of identity politics and the ideas you know i think she got a lot of criticism for not talking enough about the economy whatever but it wasn't a very like

actually style message, which was our divisions don't matter. We're one country, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Do you recite stump speeches in your sleep, like to fall asleep at night? No. I'm impressed with your recall. In my outside life, I spend very little time engaging with politics. Unlike our former colleague, Harry Anton, who used to watch old election night coverage from like the 90s on YouTube as a way to lull himself to sleep. So the one thing I will cop to is...

and I haven't done this recently, I used to really love watching concession speeches because they're the most like human, real, honest, sometimes moments in politics that I, and some of them are actually beautifully written. So I would recommend, and they're the most- How would they make you feel? Sad for them? Or you mostly felt like you were just glimpsing behind the facade?

I think just engaged, interested. But to continue my point, I think that that perceived coalition for Democrats didn't work out the way folks thought. I think Latino voters is one of the most glaring examples, but Black turnout hasn't reached the Obama numbers. In retrospect, you wonder sometimes why people thought it would, why all of these trends that were so unique to this one president would persist.

And they haven't. Well, couldn't you say the same thing about Trump? What do you mean? That what you just said was that why did people think that the circumstances unique to one president would persist? And I think based on what I understand, what you said about DeSantis earlier, you're sort of saying the same thing could happen with Trump's coalition. That if Trump is not on the ballot, a lot of a lot of the coalition changes of who's voting for the Republican Party. And so the question becomes.

the inroads that Democrats have made with, you know, Democrats now, of course, win the majority of college educated white voters, which for a long time were the bedrock of the Republican Party. Can DeSantis win those people back? I mean, I think we saw that evidenced by DeSantis winning Palm Beach County. He can in Florida. He can in an environment, and again, it's hard. He can in an environment where Democrats aren't putting up that much of a fight.

And against a weak opponent. Yeah. To your point. Obviously. I mean, is Charlie Crist a weak opponent? He the last time the Republican Party won a majority of the Latino vote in Florida, it was when Charlie Crist was a Republican on the ballot in Florida. Yes. But to your point, Republican politics have changed quite a bit. And what Charlie Crist represents now is quite different. Right. So I think, you know, look, the way that

campaigns play out. Do you remember back to 2012 when Democrats made Mitt Romney out to be the devil? It was like... That's what I watched to fall asleep at night. He...

was driving with his dog on the roof of his car. His dog got diarrhea. It was like, this man doesn't care about animals. He doesn't care about women. It was, I don't remember. But all of, you know, that moment during the debate where he talked about having binders full of women at Bain capital and he was prioritizing hiring women and things like that. And it was like, this guy's so out of touch. This guy's whatever. I mean,

If you thought Mitt Romney, if you like from the liberal perspective, you thought Mitt Romney was the devil, then like, I don't know what you thought about Donald Trump. But like, well, they also thought he was the devil. Sure. But there are ways that you can take, honestly, relatively innocuous people.

and turn them into whatever you want them to be. That's politics, baby. And so if you want Ron DeSantis to be Donald Trump, there's like a way that you can play your cards to make it so. And so that's why I don't know if automatically by getting rid of Trump, the Republican Party can win back the voters it's lost. I don't know. Okay. I'm going to stop interrupting you and ask a new question that I can then interrupt you, your answer of. So we talked about the way the media analyzes Trump.

politics perhaps changing? And you mentioned the polls are part of. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So as it's become clear that coalitions are not stable,

polls have been increasingly prone to error. Not from like a decade-long perspective, but from maybe a 2000s perspective. Relative to 2000s. Relative to the 2000s, and especially relative to Obama's time in office, which ironically is sort of when 538 became so popular. It was at a time when polls were very accurate. You're saying if- And historically accurate. And so, yes, people came-

were sort of like lulled into this view that the polls are infallible. And when the coalition shifted and when polling became less accurate, it was sort of like, well, the sky is falling. The sky isn't falling. I still believe in the scientific method. And I don't think there's a better way of understanding what the American public believes than using the scientific method, doing public opinion polling, trying to get to the bottom of people, what people believe, even if it's an imperfect science. But it made people more open

In this past election, in these midterms, we saw lots of polls showing that Democrats were not going to do so bad. But there was just this sort of inability or disinterest in accepting that. It was almost, in many ways, a post-polling election cycle.

And the moment that hit that home for me was when The New York Times published a set of House polls showing Democrats doing well in all of these different swing districts in Kansas and where I can't remember exactly where all of the districts were in Ohio. They published the results of those polls that were good for Democrats under the headline like trouble for Democrats at the midterms.

And so 100% we're at a different place than we were in 2016, when everything felt so certain. If Nate started 538...

this year, you're saying, or I guess, especially in 2020, you're saying it wouldn't be as popular because there wouldn't be that kind of reinforcing mechanism and the polls being right. And that's part of what created this sort of interest in electoral forecasting. Even as we at FiveThirtyEight emphasize uncertainty, people like to say, oh, Nate got 50 out of 50 states or whatever it was, 49 out of 50 states in 2012, right? Or whatever it was. Right. Exactly. Exactly.

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Talking about how Americans will vote or talking about how Americans have voted. Do you want an earnest answer or a hipster answer? Ooh, I love that there's no earnestness available to hipsters. You think hipsters are just totally, they don't have any earnestness in them? No. It's all facade. I was born in the year 1990. I am prime, like sarcastic millennial where everything is ironic. Would you consider yourself a hipster? No. Yeah, I don't think I would call you that either.

But I mean, in 2012, the answer would have been different. You were hipster in 2012. And everyone would have called me a hipster. I had like the acetate glasses, the skinny jeans. I spent so much of my social life in Williamsburg. It's because you've come to work for FiveThirtyEight that you have become more earnest is what I'm hearing you say. I don't know if I would go that far. Age does something to you. No longer being completely broke does something to you.

What was I asking about? Oh, yeah, I'll take the earnest answer since you are an earnest person now. And then you can give me your 2012 sentence answer. Okay, well, the earnest answer is that how voters have voted is what I'm more interested in because that is verifiable. And obviously there is polling error.

And, you know, people can reflect all kinds of biases into the survey work that they do. And as we say, ultimately, the only poll that truly matters is on election day or in the weeks before during early voting. Because in the face of real hard election data, the voter file, precinct level data, all of the

bullshit, all of the narrative, all of the, you know, oh, it's this issue, not that issue, but it can kind of fall away. And there is still narrative building. Why did these specific voters in this precinct level data, why did they show up and vote the way that they did? You're never going to have as precise of a why as you do a what, but at the very least, having a precise what will get you closer to the precise why. And so in a way, it's sad because we spend...

so many, many months poring over the pre-election polling data and talking about what it all means. Understandably so. Elections, you know, as emotionally disengaged from elections as I try to be. For most Americans, elections are extremely emotional things. I don't know if I want to say for most Americans. For Americans who pay attention to political media,

Elections are extremely emotional things. And so I understand why there is so much focus on pre-election polling. And I'm thankful because it provides me a job. However, we are pretty prone to closing the book on an election and saying, all right, what's next? 2024, let's move on. But we still don't have all the data we need in order to properly analyze 2022. And I think we're trying to do some of that here on the FiveThirtyEightPolitics podcast, but because we're nerds. Like for the most part,

cable news isn't going back and being like, Steve Kornacki, come back on. John King, come back on. Now that we have voter files, now that we have precinct level data and not the partial results in one district in Kentucky, let's talk about what it all means. That's my earnest answer. I totally agree. And one of my frustrations is about the appetite for that kind of analysis, because it is the case that so much of political journalism is fueled by anxiety.

The anxiety of the audience that wants to know the answer before they possibly can know the answer. The anxiety of the reporters to get scoops and figure out incremental change to politics when actually not much is changing at all. And anxiety among the politicians of the messaging war that they're waging, right? There's a lot more action happening on the front end than the back end, even though, to your point earlier in this podcast,

The back end, the actual votes, tell you more about what's going to happen next in many ways than whatever you were blabbing about in advance of the actual election. Don't call my analysis blabbing, Chan. I would say you're not blabbing. What verb would I put to the podcast? Pontificating? Rude. Exploring? Rude. Ruminating?

You know, I just try to call balls and strikes, Mr. Chadwick Matlin. Well, it's funny you bring up the sports. But you never let me give my earnest answer. Sorry, my sarcastic answer. I have not let you. I dared to respond with my own thoughts. But now, Galen, the floor is yours. What's your hipster answer? My hipster answer is that in a midterm election, most eligible Americans, not even just most Americans, most eligible Americans don't vote.

And even in a presidential election, it's still not the vast majority of eligible Americans voting. However, we still share a country with all of those people. Part of the reason that public opinion data can be so useful is because all of the Americans who don't vote, like, matter, you know?

And I think that as much as politics is structured in such a way that it's really only the opinions of voters that matter, like politicians have an incentive to shape themselves and their policies and whatever to the people who are actually voting. But of course, people who vote who don't vote matter. I mean, children matter. Children can't legally vote.

And so you want to lower the voting age is what I'm hearing. No, I have no idea whether or not we should lower the voting age. But knowing what Americans who don't vote think is important because also, in a way, if you know how those people think about the world, you may eventually be able to bring them into the electorate. And so just the voter files, just knowing the results of the 2022 election, I

aren't going to tell you that much about America. It's going to tell you a lot about the Americans who vote. Yeah. Interesting. Who do you think did a better job answering? The hipster you or earnest you? I think it's really a tie. Yeah. Both pretty top notch blabbing. Exploring. All right. Galen, I think we're reaching the end of our time together.

Oh my God, so fast. Well, time flies when you're the blabber. I know. When you're the questioner. You're like, your job is so boring. I just have to sit here and listen to you talk. It's not boring. You know, I like to think about where I can interject, yada, yada. It's been seven years. In seven years. What's that? It's 2022, 2029. Let's just call it 2030. Let's just round up, okay? In 2030, what percentage of this podcast, when you listen back to it, and I know you will to fall asleep at night, do you think you will still agree with?

What percentage of the... What percentage... Sorry, not will you agree with, but what percentage do you think will still hold? Do you think politics will just totally reinvent itself in the next seven years again? I mean, it'll all hold because I think a big message of the podcast is that the future is unknown and that we do the best we can with the data that we have at the moment and we keep an open mind to how the country and voters and whatever can change. Like, for example...

We have just experienced 20 years during which you pretty much couldn't go wrong by taking your moment of political analysis to say, increasing polarization, increasing partisanship, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. There's nothing written in stone that things have to remain that way. And I think we saw in 2022 some of the advantages to campaigning in a way that doesn't accept that.

So you're sort of saying... So I would say, like, who knows what the world is going to look like in 2030? I mean...

for myself, for the country, for our listeners, for this podcast. But I don't know. I guess let me put it back to you. What do you feel like are the main tenets of our coverage on the podcast that I could judge how we've done 10 years from now? That's not how this works, Galen. Seven years from now. I'm the one asking questions. You know, I think...

We are relatively restrained. However, I think on the site and just recently, you know, with Nate, there have been conversations about are Democrats doomed in the Senate for the next three cycles? That is an interesting question. It is a question that can only be evaluated with present information. Yeah. And to your point, the electorate does in some ways reinvent itself every two years.

Oftentimes that reinvention is only a half step away from what it was before. But sometimes it's a leap. And when it does leap, it is difficult for us to catch up. Do I think it's going to go that differently? No. But do I walk around telling people I know what's going to happen? No, which is sort of what you're saying, right? If for me, over the last, I've worked here for nine years, this job has just made me think it's not even worth my breath talking about what's going to happen.

It's an entire website built around. You mean the entire thing. I understand it. But anyone who tells me what's going to happen, it went like, I just don't, I don't even, it doesn't even register with me as something to meaningfully engage with. These pollsters who after an election crow that they had it right. LOL.

Sure, you got it right. That doesn't mean you were right. It means you said something and the future turned out to be what you said it might be. But that doesn't mean you somehow were like special. Is this my soapbox hour or your soapbox hour? The whole point of bringing you on here was that eventually I could go on a jack. I have jacked. So... And don't flip it where you're now interviewing me. That's not the agreement. I understand where you're coming from, but I think that...

There's more. Yes. Like crowing about, I got this exactly right, blah, blah, blah, whatever. Like that's not what this is all about ultimately anyway. But I do think that we can use historical data and historical context that is non-data. I mean, maybe all of history is data in order to try to understand, understand the past, understand the present and understand

make some assumptions about the future. I mean, something that this is, you know, we're going to really go off on a tangent here. Something that really hits us home for me is reading. I don't, I, I, part of what I studied in college was Italian literature and you read. Listeners know that you went to high school in Italy or is it? I think I mentioned it once during COVID, but yeah,

Reading the satiricon and sort of the ways in which society is- Let's just back up. You can't say satiricon and assume that people know what you're talking about. What is the satiricon? It's sort of a description of a decadent ancient Rome. Amazing. And the ways that sort of society is falling apart and the impulses of the people that leads to this sort of societal collapse.

And the description, these like thousand-year-old descriptions of people's impulses haven't changed all that much. And so I would encourage us not to just say, oh, we have no clue. People have not evolved one iota since...

Everything that we consider in history happened since the world's greatest atrocities, since the world's greatest accomplishments. This is so Hobbesian of you. We are the exact same people, like biologically. We are still as a people possible of all of those same impulses. The only things that keep us in check, I would say, are institutions. And our institutions have certainly evolved over that time. But I think it would be foolish to say that because we can't

completely predict an election within three points of the outcome that using the data that we have today is useless to try to understanding what the future will look like. Of course, we should absolutely do that. That's like that was like a super highbrow way of trying to make telling me that I was being too hipster and that you are an earnest one who is right. But like it will help us at the very least develop a set of possibilities. And again, like

I'm torn between, yes, let's use historical data in order to understand who we are and where we're headed. But let's also keep an open mind. Like Democrats lament every day of their lives how the Senate is skewed and, you know, all of these rural states and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like,

Yes. The way that our governmental structure works is that there are like winners and losers. And the winner of that structure used to be the Democratic Party, and it's not anymore. And it could be once again. And if you want it to be that way, if you want the Democratic Party to go and win small rural states, go make it happen, because it's certainly possible. And if the Republican Party wants to compete in high class suburbs and cities again, it's certainly possible. The parties ultimately do have to compete to

to try to piece together a majority coalition. And they have to go where the voters go. Yes, there are distortions and biases in our system. But at the end of the day, parties want to win. I mean, unless we literally truly dismantle democracy, the parties want to win. And they got to go where the voters are. I hear what you're saying. We've talked for long enough. I don't think we need... I need to fully rebut. Your point about institutions...

I think dovetails with what a rebuttal would be, which is there's a way to go where the voters are while also saying that the rules are unfair. I'm not saying the rules are or aren't unfair, but the people who want to, the Democrats who are upset about the Senate think that if they drum up enough action, obviously they can change the rules. That's what that's about. They can't. Are you kidding me? They're going to change the Constitution? They're going to abolish the Senate? I mean, come on. That's where history comes in. And we can tell you based on history, it's not going to f***ing happen.

And I think that'll do it for this week's show. You heard it here first. Galen Drew says it's not going to happen. Democrats, let that be the headline. Abolishing the Senate? Yeah, that's not going to happen. All right, Galen, this has been a very interesting conversation. One that my takeaway about what you are, sort of where you're at, is that you think that things have changed and that America is constantly in the process of changing, especially the American electorate. And

there's really no way to move forward about what's going to happen aside from use what we have, is what you're saying, right? Like it's imperfect, a little bit like democracy, but it's what we got. And so we have to use the information we have and we have to remain responsible within that analysis about what's to come. Yeah. I mean, doing the best we can in an uncertain world is not all that different from what everybody's life is like.

And so whether we're talking about the life of our democracy or the life of our friends or the life of ourselves, we do the best we can with what we have. We hope for a bright future but understand that life is uncertain. I would so read your self-help book that used political analysis as a way in to improving our own souls. Oh, 100%. I mean, what am I saying 100% to?

I'm an optimist. I could see you on the speaking circuit.

I don't know when you sat down to write the self-help book whether you could sit down to do it day after day, month after month. - No, I'm too much of an extrovert. In fact, whenever people, like again, this is gonna sound like so annoying to say, but like when people ask me, "Oh, do you aspire to write a book someday?" I'm like, "Absolutely not." You know me, Chad. I mean, every time we get on a Zoom, I like ask you to stay 20 minutes longer so I can just blab with you. The idea of like sitting alone-- - Not blab, not blab. - Not blab. - Explore. - The idea of sitting alone and writing a book

Sounds hellish to me. If anything, I want to do something social. Yeah, the speaking circuit. You could be a self-help speaker. I want to work with a team to make a documentary or something. I want to work with people on a project. I don't want to write a book by myself. I'd truly rather do anything but that. All right. You can play this when I one day write a book. I hope I'm in your editor when that happens. Gail and Druke.

Chadwick Malone. Thanks for coming into your studio, relinquishing control and really just settling into the blabber role. I appreciate that. Thanks so much. I don't remember what the out credits are, but I bet it goes something like this. Our...

My name is Chadwick Matlin. My name is Chadwick Matlin. Kevin Ryder and Edna Rothschild are in the control room. Kevin Ryder is on the board today. Edna Rothschild is on the camera. They're in the control room. Tony Chow is sick. Our thoughts are with him. Video editing. He's still video editing. He's still video editing. That's the kind of commitment that Tony Chow shows even at the end of the year here. And Chadwick Matlin is our editorial director. And I direct the editorial.

Goodbye, everyone. Well, no, there's another piece to it. Let's see if I can remember it totally off the top of my head. Oh, the email podcast538.com tweeted us. I'm at Galen Druke. Even though Twitter may or may not exist by the time you hear this. Tell your friends about the podcast. Tell your friends about the podcast. Five-star ratings on Apple, although I don't know if that matters as much. Spotify, people like I hear. It's an up-and-coming app.

And we'll talk to you next week. Thanks for listening. Thanks for listening. I'll see you soon. Goodbye.