Welcome back to Beyond the Polls. This week, I examine Tuesday's raucous Texas primaries with the Dallas Morning News's Groomer Jeffers. Let's dive him.

Well, Donald Trump has delivered his State of the Union address. It's 108 minutes. It's the longest address on record. And I'm going to confess something to you,

my multiple thousand closest friends in the universe. I couldn't stay awake for the whole thing.

Now, the main reason is because my dose of NyQuil had kicked in because I'm here with a little

bit of a cold. So absence on chemical stimulus, legal, of course, I probably would

have finished. But as a brief take, I'd say surprisingly good for the president. But he stayed

on message, only a few riffs. The hero stuff was really good. His use of the podium to call out Democrats is, you know, it's just become a feature

of addresses that either side seems to use these nonpartisan moments for partisan purposes,

although he does it more blatantly than President Biden never did. But if you're going to do that,

you do it effectively and he seemed to do it.

I have more about this next week when we have some polling results and we have some idea whether

or not he got a bump or not or whether it's elevated some issues. But my instant take is not bad,

in some ways good, but again, it's not my opinion that matters.

It's the American people's opinion that matters, and we'll go into that a little bit more

next week.

What I'd like to talk about today is what's going on overseas, is that we've been seeing

a lot of movement internationally. There's two things that have either both happened or

will soon happen that will once again document the rise of conservative populism. The first

thing that's going to happen is Thursday's Gorton and Denton by election in the United Kingdom.

Gorton and Denton are subsets of Manchester. One part is

heavily Pakistani and Muslim. The other part is heavily white working class. And this has developed

into a Donnybrook that is fascinating to the British media because this is a seat that should be a labor stronghold.

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