Hello my name is David Ronserman and this is Talking Politics. It is 8am on the 7th of November.

We're in Trinity College Cambridge in front of a live audience who have come to hear us try

to make sense of the midterm election results. It's a pretty mixed picture but we're going

to do our best.

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I have with me to try and make sense of all of this Gary Gersville, Professor of American

History, Helen Thompson, Professor of International Political Economy. We're going to try and

take a broader as well as a narrower perspective. We've done a few of these where we stay up most

of the night and an election happens and then we record early in the morning and this one

feels different. No one is in tears which is normally the case. Certainly that was the

case for Trump's election and for Brexit and there isn't that sense of shock that there

was after the two UK general elections. In some ways this panned out as predicted in the

sense that most people expected that the Democrats would take the House, most people expected

that the Republicans would hold onto the Senate but the Democrats have probably done better

in the House than expected and the Republicans have almost certainly done better in the Senate

than expected. So the results aren't all in as we speak but it's looking roughly like

35 seat pick up in the House for the Democrats and four or five Senate seat pick up for the

...