Hey, everybody. We got a great one today, you know, for a change. Norm Ornstein on the midterms and the wave that didn't happen. Norm, of course, has been my guest a number of times because unlike so many of my other guests, he really knows what he's talking

about. Norm, along with Tom Mann, has written a number of bestselling books on Congress,

the broken branch. It's even worse than it looks. So for once, what you hear on the Al Franken

podcast will not be useless blather. Wow, as of now, and I'm taping this

on Friday, the 11th of November, we still don't know for certain who will control the Senate and

not even certain about the House. You may have listened to my podcast last week with David Axelrod

and Cecile Richards. If you did, you may have noticed that David, who is a great friend and a brilliant

strategist and analyst, he was very pessimistic and even chided Cecile and me because we were saying, hey, we don't know.

And Cecile, of course, was talking about Dobbs and we were talking about democracy.

And as it turned out, my God, Cecil and I were kind of right.

And on Tuesday night, I texted Axe and chided him.

And he said, yeah.

As it turned out, both Dobbs and threats to democracy turned out to be big factors in what was an amazingly

a historical midterm. Joe Biden did better a historical midterm.

Joe Biden did better in his midterm than any president in memory,

if your memory goes back to 1934, any president other than FDR then in 34,

and George W. Bush in 2002, and that was because of 9-11, and of course,

the war in Iraq that he misled us into, and that was a complete disaster and tragedy.

So, democracy. Last night, my wife, Frannie, turned to me and said about the midterms.

The American people said, stop it. If you've been listening to this podcast for the last few months,

you've been hearing my growing alarm about the very survival of our democracy. You've

probably heard me talk about the litany of turning points, citizens the I did, the capture of

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