Welcome to the Bullwark podcast. It's Thursday, September 1st. I'm Jonathan Last sitting

in for Charlie Sykes. He'll be back next week. I'm joined today by James Carville. You

know who he is. He's the guy who saved the Democratic Party in the early 1990s. He loves watches,

LSU football, and he co-hosts the politics podcast war room without hunt. We're going to talk

about the watch stuff later. James, welcome back to the show. How are you, buddy?

Well, I'm good. I'm good. Every time I reach something, you're right. I'm grateful, you know,

long, no, the side. That's very kind of you. It's amazing. There's sort of different culture

that the Bullwark types, but they look at what I've been dealing with my whole professional life.

It's a really constipated political party, but it's better to be constipated and be evil,

so even the choice I'll take that. That's, you know, that ought to be the tagline for the

Democrats. That's better constipated than evil. Let's start today out in the wilds of Alaska,

where Sarah Paylon has lost her special election. She was in a bid to fill the remainder of

the late Congressman Don Young's term. She was in a three-way run-off with the Democrat Mary Peltola,

who was an indigenous Alaskan and a Republican misdispending to Nick Begich. We have a rematch of this

coming in November, just like 10 weeks away. But what was interesting in this is, A, Alaskan now

has a Democratic Congresswoman, and B, we just road-tested the new ranked choice system.

I just want to set the table for people as they understand how this worked, because it's a little

bit crazy. What we had was, we had in the first round, the Democrat Peltola finished with 40% of the

vote. She was about 16,000 votes ahead of Paylon, who was in second, as they went through the

subsequent rounds of the ranked choice voting. Begich was eliminated, because he was in third.

Half of his voters had Paylon as their number two choice. 21% didn't list a second choice,

and 29% ranked Peltola over Paylon. That's why she is now the Democratic Congressman.

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