Welcome to It's a Numbers Gang with Ryan Grudowski.

Thank you for being here for my premier episode, one of I hope to be many, many in the future.

This podcast is going to be dedicated to presenting listeners with data and information rather than narratives.

A lot of people in the media care a lot about presenting narratives and very little about giving

just straight information and letting you decide.

I want you to decide by presenting you with the data that will make you smarter, make you

more interesting, make you fun to listen to at dinner.

And every week's me a new episode,

new guests on different topics, mostly politics, but also the economy, culture, entertainment,

sports. And if I need a guest to sit there and be an expert on something, I will bring them

to you for that episode. Every episode will also have a link of it to my National Populous newsletter on Substack. If you go to natpopnewsletter.com, you can sign up for a 30-day free trial to read and visually see what I'm going to tell you.

And my first episode, I want to talk about the new year, the new Congress, and the sort of new president. I mean,

he's been there before, but he's essentially a new president. President Trump is going to come into

the presidency with a Republican Congress, Republican Senate, 53 members of the Senate are Republicans,

45 are Democrats, two are independents, and 435 members of Congress will be, have just been elected.

220 were elected as Republicans.

215 were elected as Democrats.

But the two big numbers from that you should draw are the numbers three and the numbers

16.

Three is the majority in the House of Representatives. That is all the Republicans

have. And it's even more complicated for Speaker Mike Johnson, who is trying to be reelected as

Speaker. The three-person majority is smaller because one, Matt Gates has, former Congressman Matt Gates now, has after winning re-election, and there will be a special election for his seat in Florida's first district.

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