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Welcome back to the Lincoln Project. I'm your host Reed Gailin. Today, I'm once again joined by Trigvy Olsen, senior advisor to the Lincoln Project and president of Viking strategies LLC,

Washington DC based public affairs and political consulting firm. Trigvy, welcome back. Thanks, Reed. I'm also joined again by Jeff Timmer, senior advisor to the Lincoln Project, former executive director of the Michigan Republican Party and host of a republic if you can keep it available wherever fine podcasts are fine. Jeff, good to have you back. I am glad to be here. All right, guys. So this is the third time we've done this in as many months when this drops will be four weeks out.

28 days away from election day, you know, I was in Florida in 2000 for the recount for five weeks. And I said, I'll never see anything more insane than that five weeks. And literally every election cycle since then has been more insane. And this, I think, caps it off guys. You know, here we are. We've got the dogs decision. We've got the land war in Europe.

We've got inflation for the first time in 40 years. We've got an economy that some days wants to feel good about itself and some days doesn't want to feel good about itself.

We have one major political party, our former political party that is now in the thrawl of an authoritarian strong man with now plenty of accolades who are going even further into the abyss than I don't know that I could imagine, but I'm always surprised maybe I shouldn't be.

And so here we are. This is, you know, with a month to go, you know, TrigVU and I talked about this a little while ago, just really hard to figure out what the heck is going to happen.

It's a strange question. Are there tipping points or things that will look back on and say they were tipping points in our politics that we missed or were more important than we think they were.

And there's part of me that thinks, you know, clearly January 6 has the potential to be a tipping point and where we go and maybe it didn't end up being the tipping point that we all thought it would be, you know, all of us were sitting around thinking this is when the Republicans finally give up Trump.

I think if you look at the way this cycle was unfolding and you know, this show is interesting because we have all three of us talking about it over an extended period of time.

But I think how big of tipping point dobs ended up being not even so much about the issue in question, although that certainly mattered.

But I think much more about how Americans saw that decision and the overturning of something that was established for their entire lifetime or the lifetimes of most of them.

And so being that close to what is the potential tipping point of that size and scope sometimes makes understanding what's happening in the immediacy of now hard to see without the bigger frame of reference of time.

Well, Jeff, we know that and we might have mentioned this when you and I spoke last that, you know, three times in the last 120 some years that a first term president has picked up seats in his first midterm election.

You know, the Democrats for the most part, their candidates, maybe not always our favorite flavor, but they're normal.

These are normal people.

These are normal people running for office with some level of conviction and a desire for public service. They're looking forward. They're speaking to the needs and wants of either their constituents or their potential constituents.

And then the Republicans are almost to a person insane.

Think about this. I was talking to somebody about this earlier today.

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