00:04:45 · Skanda Amarnath, Tracy Alloway
[00:04:45] S2: Except in the Midwest. I would say what Bob Dole had some quote about basically. way more ag states than there are any other kind of state. And that's going to always count more. I think that has some implications for sort of how kind of power is shaped from here. For Democrats, there's also just a sense of, oh, this was actually possible. I don't think Democrats expected to win in South Carolina unless they were in the Annie Andrews campaign, maybe. I don't think they expected to win in Mississippi. And it looks like at least that's going to be coming really down to the wire. So it just shows that there's different possibilities, which will also kind of shape how they govern, what kind of map they want to optimize towards in subsequent elections, which may just change the agenda to some degree. [00:05:26] S1: Okay. So the Senate is important, but I think the consensus assumption is still there's going to be some form of political gridlock because, for instance, the Democrats don't have the 60 votes they need to push through a Republican filibuster and stuff like that. On the other hand, I think if we learned anything from Tuesday's elections, it's that Trump seems to be politically toxic now on both the Republican and the Democratic side. So maybe there's a potential to come together on like a few.
00:05:54 · Skanda Amarnath, Tracy Alloway
[00:05:54] S2: Issues at least. Yes, it's not. In general, divided government tends to be gridlock, right? So I think it means it's harder to pass policy. It becomes harder to pass policy in a crisis. So if you think about it, like we're talking about this in 2018, right? We were talking about, OK, there was the midterms effect, but Trump was kind of going forward with his kind of trade war, trade conflict issues. Fast forward 18 months later, and you have sort of the CARES Act issues from COVID. It just required a lot of coordination. Kind of worked out then in terms of at least Congress passed a lot of different things. I'm not sure how it's going to play out this time, right? Because it does seem like there's clearly, I said, the president's quite toxic. How polarizes it? Are Republicans willing to peel off? One thing that stood out from this election cycle was you could point to two very tangible things where Policy really did matter, right? You could say tariffs clearly identifiably moved prices and the war clearly had an effect. How that does, do any Republicans actually change their sort of approach to the president? I suspect that it's hard in the context of war to change a sort of executive action. Tariffs are more interesting because you're talking, we're talking about ag states. They're probably the ones who really like really holding the bag in terms of the cost of tariffs and sort of how they were executed by the president. [00:07:11] S1: But tariffs are being pushed through now purely by executive order. So how much power does anyone else have to change them?
00:07:11 · Tracy Alloway, Skanda Amarnath, Joe Weisenthal
[00:07:11] S1: But tariffs are being pushed through now purely by executive order. So how much power does anyone else have to change them? [00:07:17] S2: And the question is, are there Republicans in the ag states? There's still plenty of them, right? And I'm talking about the middle of the country, west of the Mississippi, who clearly, I mean, I don't think John Thune really likes aggressive tariffs. It has a lot of costs for farmers and for the ag industry. Are you able to peel off some of those to actually work on restricting sort of how much power the executive branch has over trade policy? These are all, again, they're all quite reaches because it's going to require pulling off an additional set of Republicans to work with Democrats and work against the president. That's, again, I'd say more tail scenario considerations. I'm sure Democrats will be happy to run on the idea that the president is raising costs through tariffs. But, I mean, if you think about where policy can change, it would require quite a substantial amount of coordination with other Republicans in the Senate. [00:08:06] S0: Just from a numbers thing, I mean... I was in a chat with you on Tuesday night and you're like, this is historic. Like what was the early on thing? You're like, oh, this is like, we're actually talking about a history making election.
00:08:06 · Joe Weisenthal, Skanda Amarnath
[00:08:06] S0: Just from a numbers thing, I mean... I was in a chat with you on Tuesday night and you're like, this is historic. Like what was the early on thing? You're like, oh, this is like, we're actually talking about a history making election. [00:08:17] S2: Yeah. I think when you get early returns, the thing you want to look for is county comparisons where you actually have all the vote in, not just the early vote, because who votes early changes the cycle to cycle. But when you actually get those like first few counties that whether it's in Florida or Kentucky or Indiana. And you were seeing in some cases, obviously the Florida, some of the swings were narrower relative to 2024, something closer to five to eight points. But then you saw like outlier changes in a lot of other counties where it was closer to 20 points. And then it was okay. If it's 20 point swing from 2024 to 2026 in the same house race. Yeah. Those might be outliers, but it's telling you like, this is the distribution, right? And that distribution is there's like a long tail of outliers on them side. You're going to see like pretty big swings. In the end, what Texas, it seems like it's going to be close to double digits for. I've said it, but, you.
00:08:17 · Skanda Amarnath, Joe Weisenthal
[00:08:17] S2: Yeah. I think when you get early returns, the thing you want to look for is county comparisons where you actually have all the vote in, not just the early vote, because who votes early changes the cycle to cycle. But when you actually get those like first few counties that whether it's in Florida or Kentucky or Indiana. And you were seeing in some cases, obviously the Florida, some of the swings were narrower relative to 2024, something closer to five to eight points. But then you saw like outlier changes in a lot of other counties where it was closer to 20 points. And then it was okay. If it's 20 point swing from 2024 to 2026 in the same house race. Yeah. Those might be outliers, but it's telling you like, this is the distribution, right? And that distribution is there's like a long tail of outliers on them side. You're going to see like pretty big swings. In the end, what Texas, it seems like it's going to be close to double digits for. I've said it, but, you. [00:09:08] S0: Know, I've known a lot of people who work in Texas politics and they had like dream of like, well, maybe Texas will be a purple state one day. Oh, I see you wore a purple sweater today, by the way. Very bipartisan. No, no, like, and I used to just make fun of those people. That was so naive. And then to wake up, and I know so many, and it's like, it's not even a purple state. It's like a deep blue state now. I mean, the scale, it's a, what's that bomb where people, the new, like, A neutron bomb? [00:09:39] S2: Yeah, yeah.
00:09:39 · Skanda Amarnath, Joe Weisenthal, Tracy Alloway
[00:09:39] S2: Yeah, yeah. [00:09:39] S0: Where there's not even any destruction. It just, the people just disappear. It's everyone. [00:09:44] S1: It's like, and it's also not just the things that you hear about. It's like the comptroller, the lieutenant governor. [00:09:50] S0: The education board. They're going to like change the University of Texas regents because someone just told me like that person's coming out for retirement and Hinojosa is going to get to work. appoint his replacement. Like the entire state in one night essentially goes like hard party rule. Like no one like, look, I know like the purple Texas stuff has been like for years. But now it's like you wake up one morning and Texas is not just like, at least for two years, it's not just like a blue state, but like a hardcore. It's really weird. Like everyone is just like, this is like a very surreal thing to see. [00:10:26] S2: Yeah, I mean, I think that the scale of the victory itself points to, there's just like newer possibilities in a lot of these states. And when you kind of think about Texas, when I think about what the business class sort of corporate America tends to tout certain states is like, this is the state you want to be. And, like, obviously it was Texas for a long time. Wait, tell us about this business court in Texas. No, this is important. [00:10:47] S0: We'll have to do a separate episode. [00:10:48] S2: I think you'll probably need to get a separate episode. [00:10:50] S0: What's the story here? [00:10:51] S2: So Texas has created a new business court, right? And there's a lot of.