Ian Bremmer is president of Eurasia Group and author of the power of crisis,

how three threats and our response will change the world. Ian, welcome back.

Right. Happy New Year, man. Good to see you. First off, you told me put an

perspective. This whole speaker's thing, not that big of a deal, long term.

Yeah. I mean, the big deal is the fact that the Republicans have an incredibly narrow

majority in the house and that makes it hard to govern. It makes any speaker really, really

weak, whether it ends up being McCarthy or Scalice or whoever, right? But I don't think that,

I mean, there's no legislation that's going to get passed that's significant

irrespective of whatever speaker. And once you finally get one, whether it's 12 votes or it's

24, a week later or a month later, no one's talking about the story. You're worried

from the holistically, well, weakening the position so much.

No, not particularly, because I also think that if it turns out that the Republicans

have a speaker and then they pick up seats and come 2024, then they're going to have a

much stronger speaker. The issue is fundamentally about just how much the red wave didn't happen

in the midterms. That's a challenge. Why do you think it was?

On balance, I think it's because it's two things. One, I think the abortion issue played

very significantly for a lot of people. The country is a bell curve on abortion and a lot of

Republicans got squeezed into a position that was unpopular. That was challenging in a lot of

races. Secondly, I think there was a quality of candidate issue and people that were really

seen to be incompetent. Unfortunately, the Republicans ran a fair number of them just underperformed

structurally. But it could have so easily gone the other way. The Republicans would have easily

had 20 or 30 seats in this majority. And then there wouldn't have been a second vote.

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