Hello listeners and welcome to another edition of Politico's nerd cast. I'm Scott Bland, your host.

This week on the nerd cast, the Iowa caucuses have long been prized as the ultimate

test of retail politics. But the 2020 presidential race, like everything else in politics is getting very very nationalized already and we're going to talk about how that helped launch the campaign of Beto O'Rourke last week and how it's affecting the campaign of Amy Klobuchar, the senator

from Minnesota who's really trying to run in Iowa, one state south, as the senator from next door.

Plus, we are getting a sense of the early White House strategy when it comes to dealing with

investigations by the new Democratic House majority.

Ignore them.

We're going to talk a little bit about what's going on to in this strategy or non strategy by the

White House and how unusual it is and what exactly about all these

investigations Democrats have just launched actually scares the Trump

White House. As always we are taping this a little bit before noon eastern on Thursday,

today that's March 21st, so it's all up to date as of then.

No Mueller report yet, no indictments this week, nothing of that that nature at least as of our taping

all right let's get started I want to welcome our guests we have in the studio as

usual senior politics editor Charlie Metesian Charlie good to see you

hi Scott and national political reporter Elena Schneider fresh Tessian. Charlie, good to see you. Hi Scott. And National Political

reporter, Elena Schneider, fresh off the trail in Iowa. Good to see you,

Elena. Thanks for having me. All right, so our first data point today is

6.1 million dollars. That is the amount of money Beto O'Rourke raised in the first

24 hours of his presidential campaign, which launched a week ago today, and that number is pretty good.

In fact, it's the best we've seen from anyone so far,

probably ever, actually.

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