Hey, unfuckers. Welcome to a very special unfiltered and less than glamorous edition of unfucking the Republic.

You have a treat in that the three of us once again are together. We're not together in studio, but we're together hosting this very special show because it is the day after the midterm elections, we decided

to push show notes into this episode and to just have sort of a freeform, unfiltered conversation.

We were slacking all night, obviously, we were talking through who was going to kind of

pay attention to which races last night. What we really wanted to do was have some

immediate response to the midterms kind of coming on the heels of what we were talking about

with the tough on crime episode, which was the way that the Republicans were going to try to

kind of steal the thunder from the Democrats nationwide by praying on our worst fears, by, you know, going

with some classic tropes that usually work, but it's more of a kind of a parochial way to

win an election rather than a national strategy.

So it was interesting that they went with that.

The Democrats obviously had a lot better showing than most people were looking at.

My very first takeaway is fuck all pollsters and fuck the media.

And they can both go fuck themselves together in a glorious orgy because the media was feeding on the pollsters to try and create a situation where, you know what, I was likening it to, I was likening it to the buildup to a fight that is not a fight.

So if, again, I said before, I'm a boxing fan.

And there's always these, these great mismatches that will make

for a great pay-per-view and the announcers and the producers will do their level best to create

these amazing backstories for this fighter that's clearly got no shot to win and to say,

you know, there's always a puncher's chance.

And that's sort of what the media was going with here, which is try and build this thing up as best they can on fear, mostly, this red wave, what we know from midterms classically, and try to create some sort of fervor that's going to look like,

oh my God, it's the end of the world. And then what happened is mostly normal people showed up

and voted for the things that matter the most to them. And in this case, we can tease out some of what

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