Hello and welcome to the Punch Bowl News readback podcast. I'm your host congressional reporter Max Cohen, and I'm joined by Allie M Mutnick. We're actually on the road back

from the House Democratic retreat, which was held at the Lansdowne resort in Leesburg, Virginia.

It was three days filled with tons of content. Allie, thanks for joining me. What were your

initial takeaways from the Democratic retreat?

Hello, Max.

We are, as Max mentioned, driving in the car on the way back from Leesburg, Virginia.

The retreat from a reporter's perspective was a lot of press conferences.

We listened to a lot of different groups in the Democratic caucus come speak to us in the press room and a lot of members talked and then we got to ask some questions.

I believe the takeaway was supposed to be affordability. Democrats are making life more affordable. That is their message for 2026, but we

dove into a lot of topics and we got to ask them some questions. What were your takeaways?

Yeah, I think you're right. Affordability was the fighting for an affordable America was what

the retreat was officially billed as. And it was clear in every single press availability that Democrats wanted to hammer home

that they think affordability is going to be the number one issue in the midterms.

And conversely, they were taking shots at Donald Trump, who in the state of the union,

according to Democrats, basically mocked affordability, calling it a hoax, etc.

The other takeaway, which we dove into during Friday morning's top,

and we'll delve into this now,

is that Democrats were really confident about them in terms.

Oftentimes, you'll try to get these lawmakers on the record,

and they'll say, oh, you know, we're on the right path,

or things look good, but, however, you know we're on the right path or things look good.

But, however, this time around, multiple lawmakers from all across the caucus would say things like

...