Marshall here. Welcome back to the realignment.

Hey everyone, welcome back to the show. Today's episode is a slightly modified version of the

sub-stack I said on yesterday. I wanted to take the chance to review both where the show is,

where it's been, where it's going, especially given the fact that we are a little more than

a year out from the 2024 election. So at a broad level, I really find myself increasingly saying,

okay, we get it when listening to myself or another guest or host, state some 2018 vintage wisdom

when it comes to populism's effect on American politics. You know, back before I started the show

of Saga back in 2019, we were really looking for an outlet to express a lot of these realignment

centric ideas because it didn't feel as if a lot of the changes we were just noticing as young

guys out in DC were being actually recognized in, brought the broader media space. So now that I've

had the chance to do 350 plus episodes, it'll have this be a great chance to kind of go over some

of those themes, how the effect of my thinking, how they mean for things moving forward. And I'll also

answer some common questions about the show's structure because we put out so much content that

folks have a hard time actually keeping up what we're actually saying. So really kicking this off,

I want to talk about the first era of the realignment basically from 2015, 2016 to really late 2022,

right around the 2022 midterms, which were a surprise given the fact that Democrats not only

kept the Senate reformed much better in the House than anyone thought they would where a lot of

those realignment themes were we came to play, especially given the strength with suburban voters.

And the fact that certain populous candidates did not perform as well as they should have given

certain, let's say, election denial issues that came up. The first era was rooted in three events

that I really encountered my first candidate, see obviously 2015 and 2016, you're looking at the

Brexit vote, the rise of Democratic Socialism via the Bernie Sanders campaign, and of course,

...