Welcome to Talking Fed's one-on-one, deep-dive discussions with national figures about the most fascinating and consequential issues defining our culture and shaping our lives.

I'm your host, Harry Littman.

Hi everyone. Welcome to another one-on-one on talking feds. It's our challenge and in some ways

difficult duty to try to figure out just what accounted for Donald Trump's decisive.

I think that's fair to say victory in the presidential contest yesterday and no better person.

In fact, I asked last week, win-lose-or-draw in the hope that today we could be talking

with Mike Podhorser, who many of you know from the podcast. He's the former political director of the

AFL-CIO, founder of the Analyst Institute, the Research Collaborative, and the

Defend Democracy Project.

His substack, pardon me, is called Weekend Reading, and I would say it becomes weekday

reading, at least for now.

And just beyond that, he's the one I think who has thought with the most nuanced,

sophistication and tranceancy about the polling and the whole series of assumptions and other calculations that have gone into our obsession with who was going to win

and now that can unpack just what happened. So Michael, thanks, as always, for being here

on a pretty sober day.

Why don't we start at the top line of, you know, what the hell happened before analyzing why it did or where it did?

What's your overall assessment of just what brought, what by any way of thinking

of it, historically, politically, culturally has to be a very improbable comeback for a man who in his previous term tried to commit an insurrection

against the Constitution.

Right.

Well, yes, it is a sober evening to be here and one that I'm sure everybody who will be

listening to this is going to remember how they felt last night, how they're feeling today.

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