Today on the Playbook podcast, Republicans continue to reckon with this week's catastrophic election results and the path forward for both parties in 2026 and beyond.

It's day 38 of the government shutdown. Is that some movement that we feel? Plus,

Victor Orban is visiting the White House today, and we have more on what he wants to discuss

with Trump. Hello, I'm Adam Wren. And I'm Megan Messerly. It's Friday, November 7th. And without

further ado, here's what's driving the day.

Megan, Republicans are continuing to reel from the results that we saw Tuesday night in Virginia, New Jersey, New York, California, and across the country.

But if there's one sort of glaring takeaway, it's the trouble that they experience when Donald Trump himself is not on the ballot.

As we saw in November last year, he has really figured out how to drive disengaged voters to the polls.

But when he's not on the ballot, they don't show up.

And that's not only a problem for

him, but it's a problem for whoever the Republican nominee is in 2028. And so we think that

Vice President J.D. Vance is likely paying very close attention to this. And we have some

exclusive polling. Megan, this is super exciting. The latest Politico poll

shows that Vance is the top choice to be the 2028 nominee among 24 Trump voters. So no surprise here,

the vice president leading a number of other figures. So even though J.D. Vance had about a third

of the responses, Donald Trump

himself had 28% of the responses. There were sort of variations of don't know that came in third

at 14%. And then we saw people like Florida Governor Ronda Santis at 6%. former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley at 2%.

Rubio was at 2% as well. Senator Ted Cruz at 1%. And so, Megan, a lot here, not super surprising.

I mean, to be sure, it's 2025. We're three years out. A lot of this at this point is just picking up national name ID.

But I'm curious about what you make of this. Just a third overall of responses for Vance,

it seems to me that if Trump isn't on the ballot himself, that Vance has a lot of work to do

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