Hi, everyone. Welcome to Positively Dreadful with me, your host, Brian Voiler. People are really

good at constructing arguments or theories about things that they wish were true. And for that reason,

going into Election Day Tuesday night, you could have told yourself anything you wanted about

what was likely to happen. But two versions of events were rooted in more than just raw, motivated

reasoning. One was that the election was shaping up to be very close because that's what the polls kept

saying. Another was that Republicans were poised to win big because that's been the pattern in

recent midterms. And because that's what newsmakers and media figures kept saying publicly,

people's top issue is inflation. Well, that's bad for Dems. Republicans promised a red wave or

red tsunami. Democrats began a round of preemptive recriminations or pre-criminations, whatever you

want to call them. Voters have told us all year what they care about. And I think we have

focused on other things. I was talking to a political strategist this week of Republican who

said to me, you know, the president is out there saying, trust me to get you out of the ditch

that I put you in. And that's a very difficult cell because I know you're you're smirking at me,

but that's what people believe is that it's his fault it may not be, right? And then the votes came

in and it was basically a tie. And as we record this, it seems like Republicans are narrowly favored

to win a very small majority in the House and Democrats are pretty well situated to either keep

their 50 vote Senate majority or at a seat. And the storyline that's taken over the phantom red

tsunami is that Republicans really blew it, which they quite certainly did. They paid dearly for

banning abortion. They paid dearly for rejecting democracy. The tax they paid for lashing themselves

to those extreme ideas and to Donald Trump just canceled out the advantages they entered the

contest with. Obviously, there's no scientific way to measure this, but generally speaking,

there seem to be a correlation in most places between how tightly candidates associated themselves

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