Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening, wherever you are. And welcome to the politics guys with your host, Jay Carson and Michael Baranowski.

Welcome to the politics guys. I'm Michael Barronowski, a political scientist at Northern Kentucky University.

My co-host this week, as always, is Cleveland Area Attorney and sometime Republican strategist Jay Carson.

Before we get to today's show, a brief word about the future of the politics guys.

When Jay and I started the podcast back in February of

2015, it was most definitely an experiment. Our plan was to see if we enjoyed doing it, which we

definitely did and still do, to see how much time and money it took to do on a regular basis,

more of both than we imagined, it turns out. And finally, to see if we could build up a large

enough audience to keep the podcast going over the long haul. Now, when the show went on

hiatus last summer, we only had a few hundred listeners, but we decided to come back in the fall

and give it one more try. Almost immediately, our listener numbers started spiking, and before

long, we ended up with

thousands of listeners.

Now, that's incredibly gratifying for both Jay and me, but unfortunately, we've hit an audience

plateau that's well short of what we need to sustain the podcast.

In order to justify the time and money we put into the show, we'll need to get to at least

twice the audience we

currently have. That might seem like a lot, but considering that we've already grown nearly

tenfold since our summer break, we think it's definitely possible. But not without your help.

The vast majority of people who listen to the politics guys find it through iTunes, and the

best way to get a podcast noticed on iTunes is for it to have a lot of reviews. Right now, even with thousands of listeners,

we've only got 33 ratings and just 26 customer reviews on iTunes. So if you're a regular

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