Hello listeners it is Thursday October 19th 2017 I'm Scott Bland your host and you are

listening to Politico's nerd cast We're going to talk about a few different things on this week's show. We're going to start off talking about the latest outrage enveloping the Trump administration, President

Donald Trump's response to the deaths of four soldiers in Niger earlier this month. There's been a big hubbub over

exactly when he called their families and what was said and in which he he

brought in and criticized President Obama's response to Gold Star Families,

some other things and it kind of blew up into another one of these big stories that envelopes

the Trump administration.

We're going to talk a little bit about what happened and

going to dive into a story that Eliana Johnson wrote recently about how

distractions are substance for the Trump administration and what that means. We're also going to talk

about 2017 elections. We have governor's races coming up in New Jersey and Virginia.

The Virginia one is especially close in battlegroundy, so we're going to dive into that a little

bit and talk about the candidates and the campaigns and what we expect to happen in

November and beyond as new governors take off as in those states.

And then we're going to talk about 2018.

We've got at this point a little over a year to go until Election Day 2018,

and most of the candidates that we're going to be talking about at that time are already in their races.

We've got Republicans running against Democratic senators.

We've got Democrats running against Republican House members.

We're going to talk a little bit about who those people are, what binds them, and how they're different

from each other also and from what we've potentially seen in past elections.

We're going to dive into all that and more in the third segment.

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