Hello there. Welcome to another episode of the Chuck Toddcast, whether you're watching on YouTube,

listening on Spotify, Apple, or wherever else you might listen. I appreciate you being there.

And oh, by the way, I now have a free weekly substack. It's got a lead item and column in it. Every Tuesday it's going to drop.

Tuesday's the one day we don't drop the podcast. So that's, you see what we did there. So I hope you go

there and subscribe to it. In fact, it's something you've heard me dabble in before, but it's a

more thorough analysis of how fragile the two major parties are in

this moment. I think both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, you know, as divided as

America is between red and blue, right, we're polarized sort of between two sides. The two

actual political parties that represent red and blue have never been weaker, right? And essentially more,

and they've been dominated by cults of personality over the last 20 years. Just when it looks like

they need refurbishing, a cult of personality rises up to sort of paper over their problems.

Think Barack Obama for the Democrats or Donald Trump for the Republicans. And yet we are watching around the world,

the movement where there's, you know, we've seen this. There's clearly a massive political

realignment taking place globally. And what I saw take place in the UK that I brought up a while

ago about what happened to the Tories there, the fact that they, at least in these last elections, were not treated like one of the two major parties. If you did not, if you wanted to vote against labor, you didn't vote for the Tories. You voted for the Reform Party, UK, the Nigel Farage party, if you will. And it's sort of a simple premise to me. It's like, how weak are the two

brands of the major parties right now? Think about it this way. If Donald Trump said today,

we're going to disband the Republican Party and replace it with the MAGA, with a new political

party, the MAGA party, who's with me, I'm going to guess 70% of the elected

Republicans would sign up for the new party. And suddenly you would have a complete exodus

from the official club known as the Republican Party. Similarly, if Pete Buttigieg, Andy Beshear,

Gretchen Whitmer, AOC, banded together and said, you know what, the Democratic brand is broken.

It is a mess.

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