Hello and welcome to the Americano podcast, a series of discussions about American politics

and the Trump presidency for the New Spectator USA website. I'm joined today by not one but two

writers from the Washington Free Beacon, Liz Harrington and Bill McMorris. Thank you both for coming in.

Thanks for Adam. And I'd like to start off talking about the midterms because it seemed to me I wrote a piece

of the magazine last week that the blue wave is not really materializing as a lot of Democrats hoped it would.

But then perhaps the last week's news cycle has not been very good for Bill's got a call.

For the Republicans, I think that's probably fair to say that momentum, the post-Cavanaugh momentum that the Republicans were enjoying, perhaps has been halted a bit.

Is that a fair assessment? Start with you, Liz?

I think it could be,

but also I don't think we can, we should really underestimate how much that whole episode did,

in fact, energize the Republicans. And if you look at the early voting now, Republicans are still

keeping pace with Democrats. So I think, I mean, it's going to be,

we'll see what happens. The Senate map has always been good for Republicans. They're looking like

they can make some gains in states that they didn't even think we're in play. New Jersey's now

a toss-up, perhaps. The Senate always looked good for Republicans. It's really the House

with all these retirements you had, a lot of open seats, so there's a lot of toss-ups. So the

new cycle is getting better for Democrats, of course, that helps them. But there's also still a lot

of stuff that is important to Republicans in the news cycle, like the caravan and immigration and stuff like that.

Bill, you think this is, do you agree with that?

Well, I don't think the map in the House was ever that friendly to Republicans.

These are seats that they won in the 2010 wave that really, they should have been lost in 2012 and 2014. A lot of them are

majority Democrat districts, maybe a Republican by a point or two. So even in friendly regions

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