Hello there, happy Wednesday. It's Chuck Todd, and yes, the Chuck Toddcast is back after a short

hiatus. I am back. I am independently owned. I am not part of any media empire. I am a part of the

new class of independent journalists. And in some ways, you want to talk about reporting without fear or favor? Well, there's nothing like working for yourself. The only fear is when I look in the mirror and the only favor is to try to be honest. No BS for you. As you know, starting on a Wednesday, one of the reasons why I will always have a podcast

dropping on Wednesdays is because, as you know, as I like to say, is that if it's Tuesday,

somebody is voting somewhere. Well, this Tuesday, past Tuesday, April 1st, was a pretty

significant Tuesday, at least in the first 100 days.

Here we are still in the middle of the first 100 days of the new Trump administration.

We're on day 72, to be exact.

And with these early elections, so two-house special elections in Florida last night

and the Wisconsin Supreme Court race that also, that was a statewide election. And look, I will go

down rabbit holes later throughout these episodes. I won't do it here. It drives me nuts that we

even have elections for judges. I think that is ludicrous. Go read Alexander Hamilton's

Federalist Papers on this. We should not be electing judges,

but I'm not going to go on that rant now. What matters here is what did we learn from this?

Well, we're 72 days in to the Donald Trump administration, and in many ways, it's deja vu all over

again. What we're seeing in the Democratic Party's overperformance in these three special

elections on April 1st and, frankly,

another special election a couple weeks ago in Pennsylvania for state Senate district, is that

Democratic-based voters are more fired up about voting right now than Republican-based voters.

It's the same phenomenon we saw in 2017, same phenomenon, frankly, we saw in 2018. There is something that I believe that

exists. I call them shotgun Trump voters, meaning when Trump's on the ballot, they vote. And when

Trump's not on the ballot, they don't. Well, Trump wasn't on the ballot in Wisconsin, and his people

...