Good morning. Good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are. And welcome to the politics guys with your host, Jay Carson and Michael Baranowski.

Welcome to the politics guys. I'm Michael Baranowski, a political scientist at Northern Kentucky University.

Today I'll be talking to John Sides, an associate professor of political science at George Washington University.

Professor Sides has written or co-written a number of books, including campaigns and elections and the Gamble,

choice and chance in the 2012 presidential election.

He's also the founder of the Monkey Cage, a political science blog he started in 2007.

It was so popular and so good that six years later, the monkey cage moved over to the Washington Post, where it's been ever since.

Professor Sides, welcome to the politics guys.

Thanks very much for having me.

Now, I'm guessing that people probably know you best from The Monkey Cage, which is sort of an

unusual name for a politics blog.

And I was wondering if you could explain the name of it.

When we were creating the monkey cage in 2007, we probably could think of a great name that had politics or something like that,

or political science in the title that sounded very interesting. So we started

casting about for other kinds of possibilities. And I ran across this quote from the writer H.L.

Minkin, which is that democracy is the art of running the circus from the monkey cage.

Other versions of that passage actually say,

democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.

And in either case, we thought that that was a, you know, kind of a fun way to signal the content of the blog, but do so in a way that, you know, I don't know,

it was a little bit more creative than some cognate of political science or politics.

Right, right.

So, and do you think there's, do you think it was just a very catchy title, which it is,

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