Hello there. I'm Chuck Todd. Welcome to another episode of the Chuck

podcast. So it's been a pretty busy week in American politics. We had

national election night on Tuesday. We had a Republican

debate hosted by NBC News on Wednesday. Coming up, by the way, I've an interview with Colin Oliver. He's a Democratic congressman from North Texas.

He is running for the US Senate in Texas, one of two Senate seats that Democrats are targeting that Republicans hold, the other one being Florida, they're really not targeting any others.

In Texas and Florida, he obviously would be running against Ted Cruz.

That interview is coming up in a couple of minutes, but let me give you my quick takeaways first on election night

obviously abortion is continues to be the dominant theme and issue of these elections

and the Republican Party really has to figure this out, and they haven't figured it out. And there's a reason why they haven't figured it out. Because the Republican organizations and sort of Republican grassroots organizing at its core has been organized around the pro-life movement.

And so you have candidates who have been organizing around it for so long that the Republican Party and I've talked about this before I think

I've talked about it with some guests before to sort of suddenly change what they've done for

35 40 years I mean the volunteers that show up to stuff envelopes and a

campaign on a Republican side of the aisle all are folks who volunteer

usually full-time for a pro-life group.

So the movement itself has been at the core of organizing inside the Republican Party.

So it is, while it's easy for all of us that cover this from sort of 30,000 people to say, well,

the voters are speaking, you know, at this point, this is not a 50-50 issue. You know, when the voters have spoken,

the voters have spoken.

And usually a smart political party

figures out how to at least accept the voter verdict

and move on. But they can't figure out how to do this because it would totally up in primary politics for them.

And that's the that's the that's the conundrum they face now I halfway I expect

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