Hello listeners and welcome to another edition of Politico's nerd cast. I'm Scott Bland, your host.

This week on the

on the nerd cast the roster of 2020 presidential candidates got even

longer this week. Democratic Senator Kamala Harris announced her run for

president followed closely by the mayor of South Bend,

Indiana, Pete Budajajaj.

We're going to dig into this ever expanding field with everything from people representing

40 million constituents to people representing, you know, a few hundred thousand.

Do you the first Maltese American ever to run for president?

P Buddha Judge?

Excellent question, Charlie. One I'm sure we'll dig into Chris can you look

into that plus the shutdown is still happening it's been 34 days at the time of this taping and it

looks like things are going to get even longer. We'll have White House reporter

Nancy Cook joining to update us once more on just what's going on here inside

the White House and all the drama surrounding

this messy battle. As always we are taping this at about noon eastern on

Thursday today that's Thursday January 24th so it's all up to date as of then. Who knows what what

mayors might jump into the presidential race by the time this is

released. All right, let's get started. I want to welcome our guests

returning. We have Chris Kettleago, National Political

reporter for Politico. Hi Chris. Hi, nice to be back. Thanks for being here and making his

Nerdcast debut I believe we have another Politico National Political

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