Hi, everybody. Welcome to Smarter News. As you know, we're all about quick and concise, nonpartisan information. But just because we don't have a political agenda doesn't mean that we can't have guests that have opinions on politics. And we need those guests and those friends because they make life a lot more

interesting. And we have a phenomenal guest today, a friend of mine who is a writer, author,

host, political analyst, commentator, mom of four. She's the mom of the Belgian Malinwa that

just swallowed a washcloth that she had to bring to the emergency room. So if there's anyone in America that can talk about politics, it's Mary Catherine. She does a little bit of everything, right? I mean, Mary Catherine, if you can handle all of that, you can handle the dynamics of the political landscape in America. Am I right? One would hope. Yeah, that's what I've been preparing for my whole life. By the way, the world's allegedly smartest dog breed. Don't get yourself in that position, sir. Anyway, it's fine. He's fine now.

It was one of those phone calls that we had that we covered a lot of ground that also included an emergency room visit for for your puppy so at least it wasn't a child i mean that we've been there too

so we're good at that i know you're traveling you're on the road you got a lot going on i i just really

wanted to get your gut check about what was happening or what is the takeaway from this election. We know it's an off election year,

so we don't have a ton of elections nationwide, but we were looking at a few big ones.

If you could just sort of bulletpoint it for us, what do you think is the takeaway from

Election Day 2025? Okay. I think the two top lines, this is more of a swing back to Democrats than many expected,

even though these are blue places, even though they were expected to do pretty well,

particularly in the state of Virginia, the House delegates and all the down-ballot races were affected as well.

Places like, oh, I don't know, Bucks County, which you and I are both familiar with.

The premier swing county in the premier swing state, a lot of down-ballot races went left.

New York City, obviously, elected a very left-leaning mayor, up to an including Democrat Socialist.

And in New Jersey, you had a Democrat candidate, Mikey Sherrill, who way overperformed polling.

I mean, that was supposed to be a tight race, and she's got a double-digit lead coming out of it.

The other thing is, so that's the one thing, but it's not just a backlash.

I think what all the successful candidates had in common is that they weren't just saying

we hate Trump, which is part of the message.

They were also saying affordability a lot.

And what I'm taking away is that you can almost pair anything with an affordability argument,

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