This is the Libertarian podcast from the Hoover Institution.

I'm your host Tom Church and the Libertarian is Professor Richard Epstein.

Richard is the Peter and Kirsten Bedford Senior Fellow here at the Hoover Institution.

He's the Lawrence A. Tish Professor of Law

over at NYU and is of course a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago.

And Richard, we've gotten some mostly election results for 2022 and we didn't see the red wave we were all expecting.

The Senate is staying Democratic. The House is flipped over to Republicans and of course we still have a Democratic president.

Now it's 2022. I will note it's feeling maybe a little bit like 2015.

We have president or former president Trump announcing that he's going to be running for

president again.

So we have a lot to talk about this week.

I think I'd like you to start with the midterms.

We were looking at, well, even a week before the election, we were looking at, you know, the Senate going maybe 53, 54 seats to Republicans. That didn't happen.

What do you think, why did this happen, Richard? What happened?

You're asking the wrong guy, so I'll give you with no confidence my predictions.

I think the first thing to note is to actually looked at the expenditures.

All the Republican senatorial candidates in disputed areas were outspend two, three, four to one.

And I think once that happens, if you concentrate your spending at the end, you can have an enormous movement between a Friday poll on the one hand and a Tuesday election on the other hand because of the late shifts that are starting to take place. So I do think that that was a very

serious element in this particular situation. In addition to that, what happened is the Republicans

fumbled some of the issues that they ought to have done right, both by omission and by commission.

One of the things that was not involved in all in this particular debate was the fiasco that took place inside of Afghanistan, the military

unprepared this issue, seemed to get lost.

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