Welcome to In Conversation, the regular podcast of E-Shab magazine.

Go to esharp.com.E.U. for free access to all our podcast to date.

This is Paul Adamson. I'm in conversation with David Wasserman.

David Wasserman is the House editor of the Cook Political Report.

David, you're here in Brussels and making a presentation at the Microsoft Center.

So it's a kind of foretaste of that presentation you'll be making soon.

Let's look back briefly at the midterm elections all of six weeks away before we talk about the future.

Pundits seem to be talking about those midterms ever since Mr. Trump was elected two years ago.

When the events actually panned out, were there any major surprises in the midterms from your point of view?

Well, the surprise to many Americans was how divergent the outcome was between the House and Senate.

This was not a pure blue wave in the sense that Democrats

gained seats everywhere. They won House back by quite a comfortable margin, but they actually

lost two Senate seats at the same time. And that's going to be very important moving forward

because the Senate has a lot of power in many respects, not only to confirm Trump's judicial appointments to the Supreme Court

and federal courts, but also to confirm Trump's cabinet picks, which is pretty important

considering how much of a revolving door the White House and the cabinet have become.

They also hold the final say on impeachment matters. So Democrats are

cheerful about taking control of the House, but this is also going to be a very contentious next

congressional term. But presumably the Democrats realized a long time ago they were never going

to regain control of the Senate, but the fact that the Republicans actually increased their majority, that was a bit of a surprise then.

Well, if you had told people that Democrats would gain 40 House seats, which was beyond most people's expectations,

it was at the upper end of our range of the Cook Political Report we were anticipating they'd gain between 30 and 40,

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