The Gab Fest is sponsored by Audible, offering more than 70,000 downloadable audiobooks.

You can get a free book by signing up for a trial membership at Audiblepodcast.com slash GabFest.

Hello and welcome to the Slate Political Gab Fest.

For the 21st of May, I'm John Dickerson here in Washington, D.C., with David Plotz,

and to my left is Emily Bazelon in a rare Washington appearance, for which we are all deeply grateful. To your left in all respects, I think. I think that's a good point. I'm being categorized. I feel about that. Though I'm oddly to your left, Emily, and that doesn't make any sense. No, yeah. Well, ideologically, if we positioned you, I'm not sure we'd have room in this dimension.

Yeah.

Yeah. Well, ideologically, if we positioned you, I'm not sure we'd have a room in this dimension.

Yeah.

So we're all very excited because two things.

One, we had political results from actual elections this week, and that's going to dominate the show.

We won't really break it into topics, although we do have some vague plan about how we're going to proceed. But before we do so, David's got a brief announcement. Hey, GapFest listeners in the Mid-Atlantic region. As you hopefully know, we're going to be in Philadelphia for a live show next week, May 27th, Thursday night at 7 p.m. at the Friends Center. Is that right?

Yes, the Meeting House downtown. The Friends Meeting House downtown. It's going to be a great show.

A lot of you have already signed up for tickets, but we would love to see more of you there.

So please, if you're interested, go to Eventbright, B-R-I-T-E, eventbrite. Dot PhillyGabFest.com, and buy tickets and come see us, and we're really looking forward to it. And we're going to have, you know, dancing ponies and all kinds of dancing ponies, although alcohol is not allowed in a meeting house, dancing ponies are allowed in the meeting house. It's a strange.

I bet you didn't know that. I bet that's true. Is it George Fox? Yes. Tradition to have dancing ponies. Okay. Here we go. We had primaries in Arkansas, Pennsylvania and Kentucky, and a special election in the 12th congressional district of Pennsylvania, which all give us results and things that happened. happened. And there was also actually an election in Oregon, but it was by mail. And so we won't be

finding out about that until sometime in next year. Emily, your reaction to the election on Tuesday.

It seemed like really just good news for the Democrats all around. I guess one thing is that...

Arlen Spector is so gone already that she's even

forgotten him. I thought this was going to be a big moment for you when he lost. I thought you were like... That's part of my good news for the Democrats. Oh, you want me to say how glad I had you were floating and you'd be dancing on his grave. I have to say, I think I'm having a week where I'm just drenched in empathy. And I am completely glad that our inspector will no longer be the senator from

Pennsylvania. But when I was actually watching him concede the other night, he could barely choke out two sentences. It was so upsetting and unfathomable to him that he would no longer be a senator. I actually felt sort of sad for him. Blah, blah. I mean, you know, he's had the job for how many years, hundreds of years.

He's five term senators.

Yeah, 30 years.

...