Hey there,

Gailin here, happy holidays and Merry Christmas.

We're going to be off this week, and so we're re-erring the Primaries Project,

maybe you remember it.

It's our three-part series investigating our modern primary system.

It's going to be airing today, this coming Thursday, and also next Monday, New Year's Day.

Happy New Year's as well. And we'll be returning to our regularly scheduled

podcast programming later in the first week of the new year.

I'll say it's been an interesting year of the invisible primary, a concept that we'll talk about in this episode,

with Donald Trump really holding a commanding lead, despite some institutional pushback

and some challenges fighting to gain ground on him.

Now with the Iowa Caucasus just weeks away,

we thought it would be a good time to reflect on the fact

that our primary process is really quite arbitrary and it may not even

necessarily be the best way to decide on candidates in the first place. So with all of that

in mind and getting ready for the 2024 primaries.

Here is the first episode of the primaries project. The Iowa State Fair, it's known for things like...

We're serving the

the

Illinois girls looking at them for the elephant rise.

The Iowa State Fair, it's known for things like

We're serving corn dogs, so we have regular foot long double bacon,

...