Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Muckrake podcast. Today, Jared Yates Exxon is out and not available to record with me, your other co-host, Nick Houselman.

So as a result, I'm bringing in friend of the pod, Jason Needleman, who teaches political theory at the University of Laverne in Southern California and a guy that you, I'm sure,

will recognize his voice because he's been on the show several times. And Jason, I can't wait

to break some stuff down with you. Great to be here. Thanks for having me. Awesome. Well,

you know, I think we should start with talking about the midterm elections a little bit because

there was an interesting article

in the New York Times that discussed the Republican, let's see, interest or how was they turned

out in these elections? And when you're watching places like Fox News and they're tearing their

hair out because, oh my God, they're realizing that they have a turnout problem. It looks like when you look at the numbers, it wasn't that issue in 2022.

And I wondered what your reaction was to that.

Yeah. I mean, it's actually kind of shocking. I didn't expect that more Republicans would vote in the midterm election than Democrats.

Because we really thought that that wouldn't happen for the foreseeable future. Our complaint was

always, you know, we can turn out millions more voters, and because of gerrymandering, the Republicans

will still hold the House. So we on the left would kind of hammer away at the voter turnout

question and, you know, lament gerrymandering in single member districts. And we would say,

oh, six million more people voted Democrat, and yet the Republicans held the House. Well, shockingly, actually, from the data that's in so far, it looks like more Republicans

voted than Democrats.

And you kind of see this in some of these states where Democrats eeked out, these swing

states where Democrats eeked out narrow victories like Raphael Warnock most

recently. Because if you look at the other statewide elections, Republicans did really well.

Yeah, exactly. That's fascinating to me. And we knew that was going to happen. Like with split tickets,

someone would vote for a Republican governor and maybe the Democratic Semeter, which I think in the in the historical perspective, that is like unheard of.

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