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Hello and welcome to the Americano podcast, a series of discussions about American politics and life.

My name is Freddie Gray. I'm the deputy editor of the spectator.

I'm very pleased to be joined by Sean Trendy, who is

senior elections analyst at Real Clear Politics. And we're going to be talking about the upcoming

midterms. Now, Sean, for the last couple of years, really, the sort of consensus view has been that

the Republicans are going to have a very good time in the midterms,

that there's going to be a red wave and so on. But in the last few weeks, and this has largely

been attributed to President Joe Biden's hot streak, in quote marks, a reverse consensus has

appeared, which is that the Democrats are going to do a lot better than

expected. Is that a fair summary of sort of where opinion is? Yeah, I think that's certainly

a fair summary of where kind of elite consensus opinion on this is right now, that maybe, you know,

a year ago we were looking at Democrats losing four, maybe five seats in the Senate, you know, a year ago, we were looking at Democrats losing four, maybe five seats in the

Senate, you know, 30 to 40 in the House of Representatives. You know, the Senate is our upper chamber,

which we elect here, on a statewide basis. So, yeah, that was the consensus. And over the course

of the summer, things have started to look

quite a bit better for the Democrats. Their polling has improved. So people seem to have dialed

back expectations somewhat. A lot of the talk about this democratic blue wave against the

Republican red wave has been not just about Joe Biden doing slightly better than he has been,

but also about

...