Good evening and welcome to this episode of the Barry Trump Show. I am so excited and honored

to have as my guest tonight, Ellie Belchey. Ellie, thank you so much for being here. It's

great to see you outside of the context of your show. It's been a bit of a wild ride. Let's

keep it to the last few months because otherwise. Otherwise, we need several of these episodes.

Exactly. We need an entire limited series or unlimited series, as the case may be. But

a couple of things I want to talk to you today have to do with your exemplary work in Ukraine

and how the situation in Ukraine plays out in America how it doesn't. But let's start with

the most obvious. The midterms were quite something. And I'm just eager to get your take on the

framing leading up to them, the results and the potential follow up.

I think the biggest part of the framing leading up to them, which is interesting and learning

opportunity for us, is that we measure presidential popularity a certain way and we've been measuring

it the same way for years and years and years. Going into this election, we knew that the

measure of Joe Biden's popularity was around 44-45% depending on what polls you looked at,

which was relatively low compared to recent presidents. So it was not meant to help him.

In the case where the president, the party that holds the White House, would typically

lose seats in the midterm elections unless there were some unusual event like after 9-11

when George W. Bush didn't, you would think that the lower popularity levels of the

president would contribute to a greater loss. And what I'm realizing, I'm an economics

guy, it's a little like GDP. You can tell people what GDP growth is because it's the only

measure we have of all the things we produce and sell in the economy. But sometimes it's

not reflective of what's really happening out there. So you can generally think that Joe

Biden isn't exactly the president you'd want him to be, isn't perhaps as robust as you'd

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