Hello there I'm Chuck Todd and welcome to another episode of the Chuck Todd

cast. One of the more bizarre statistics that I like to conundrums that I like to introduce to people sometimes is this bizarre factor.

On one hand people don't want to be associated with either

major party. The popularity of the Democrats and the Republicans has never been smaller to both parties in normal to popular.

In fact, the two major parties have never been weaker.

They have very little ability to

control who their nominee is on the Republican side. For instance, trust me,

if the leadership could get together, it wouldn't be the current field as it is, and perhaps the same thing on the Democratic side if you've got the supposed power brokers in there that might include donors and key activists and constituency groups, you'd have a different situation.

But the point is this, parties have never been weaker and yet partisan identification has never

been stronger.

What do I mean by that?

People have never been more comfortable publicly to say I'm on team blue or I'm on team red.

So you have this incredible sort of strong identity towards the red and the blue,

towards this side of you,

either on one side of the eye or the other side of you.

But there is no strong affinity for the actual two parties themselves, right?

That affinity is much weaker.

I bring this up because this issue has also impacted the ability of even constructing anything

under the umbrella of bipartisan.

Whether it's bipartisan ideas to sort of solve a problem.

I mean, we'll label stuff bipartisan,

the infrastructure bills considered bipartisan.

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