Hi, this is Claire and I'm currently sailing through the Drake passage on my way home from an expedition to the Falkland Islands, South Georgia and Antarctica as a Grovener teacher fellow with National Geographic and Lynn Blad expeditions.

This podcast was recorded at 209 PM on Monday, December 12th.

Things may have changed by the time you hear this, but hopefully I'm not still seasick. Okay, here's the show.

That is a very cool gig. Wow, I mean we are really our listeners do so many really interesting. Yeah, it's amazing. They can hear us even on the other side of the world.

I love it. The beauty of podcasts. Hey there. It's the NPR Politics Podcast and Susan Davis. I cover politics. I'm Dominican Montenores, senior political editor and correspondent.

I'm Mara Laias and a national political correspondent and full democratic control of Washington will come to an end in just a few weeks.

Republicans will take control of the House on January 3rd and present a new check on President Biden's power.

Today we're going to talk about the first two years of Biden's term and maybe what we can expect in the next two.

Mara Biden is president at a time when all these old rules about approval ratings and public opinion just don't seem to matter in the same way.

You know, a majority of Americans say they disapprove of the president and yet 2022 defied the expectations and what it would mean about a referendum on the White House.

That's absolutely true. Historical rules only work till they stop working and a lot of them stopped working this cycle.

We used to think that the president's approval rating was tied to the economy. We saw during Trump that even when the economy was great his approval rating wasn't very good.

We thought this time that when the president Joe Biden is unpopular it means that his party will do very badly in the first midterm and that didn't happen.

So I think that we also saw in the polls that a lot of people, I sent 29% of people who said that they were unhappy with Biden's stewardship of the economy still turned around and voted for Democrats.

So these things are not straight line correlations anymore. We're very tribalized country and people were angry about a lot of politicians including the Democrats and power but they were also fearful about what Republicans might do if they came into power.

Well, there certainly was not a straight line but I think we had two major intervening factors.

One was the earthquake of abortion rights and the DOBS decision and that clearly was a major motivating factor for not just women but a lot of people center left to center right frankly.

And there were also a lot of extreme candidates. I mean you had a lot of candidates who've been pushing former president Trump's lies about the election and that just proved a step too far for a lot of voters.

But Domenna, how can you square some of this in that as Mora noted. A lot of voters don't approve of the president but still end up voting for the party that he represents.

But yet one of the topics we talk about on this podcast all the time is polarization that voters are more and more and more polarized.

But yet we just had an election where polarization wasn't necessarily the defining factor.

Well, you know, look, there are not a lot of choices for people in this country. You got either or that's kind of it, right.

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