Hi, I'm Bill Crystal. Welcome back to Conversations. I'm very pleased, very pleased to be joined here two days after Election Day in 2022. November 10th by Ron Brownstein. We've done conversations after the elections of 2018 and 2020.

And before that, incidentally, which all of which people should go back and listen to is they're all very revealing about American politics, but right after 2018, I think there's a weekend after you predicted a Biden Harris ticket in 2020. That was, that was good.

Yeah, well, we probably should have stopped.

Well, I think led there, you know, the primary is not always follow logic, but in this case, they sort of did.

Anyway, Ron Brownstein is a senior editor at the Atlantic, a senior political analyst at CNN, one of the leading, in my view, analysts and most thoughtful and interesting analysts of American politics, American history, popular music.

Rocky on the water is very well received book about the 70s and L.A. is for sale at bookstores everywhere. If bookstores existed, it would be sale. It's for sale.

So get that book and Ron, thanks for joining me and let's have a wide range in conversation. We don't have the answers to everything, but I think we can put a lot of questions and issues on the table.

But what happened on Tuesday? Where are we now? Where broadly we'll get to that and then kind of where are we going? But what happened Tuesday?

But someone comes down from Mars or has been away for 20, you know, for two years and says, Hey, what happened in this in this midterm election?

So in one sense, what happened Tuesday is what has been happening in midterm elections for quite some time.

Assuming Republicans win the House, this will be the fifth consecutive time that a president went into a midterm with a unified control of government and had the voters revoked.

Right. So it happened a Trump in 2018 Obama in 2010, W Bush in 2006 Clinton in 94, no presidents is Jimmy Carter in 1978 as defended unified control of government through a midterm.

And in one sense, the macro story that we are living through since the late 60s is the inability of either party to establish a durable advantage over the other.

So in one extent that we have not seen before in American history over a 50 year period, no one's had unified control of government for more than four consecutive years since 1968 and we've never gone 50 years where that's been true.

So in one sense, you know, a shift toward the Republicans shift away from the party holding unified control is exactly what we've been experiencing in American politics for at least the last 40 years.

But the nature of this shift was far different, as you know, than anyone expected. If you look at the exit polls and you look at the 75% of people who said the economy was bad or poor, roughly 55% disapproved of Joe Biden's job performance.

The electorate was more Republican who tilted a little more Republican than it has been in the past as one Republican consultant said to me today every indicator on the dashboard was like pointing toward redway and we didn't get redway.

And I believe the reason we didn't is because this was what I have called a double negative election. You have that negative verdict on Biden's performance, no way arguing around that it's 55% say any disapproved of his job. And as I said three quarters say the economy is doing badly, but those negative verdicts on the part on what Democrats have done with power were bounded and limited by equal concern about what Republicans would do with power.

If given to them. And I think the you know 60% roughly 60% in the exit polls so they had an unfavorable opinion of Trump clear majority wanted to keep abortion legal.

And what Democrats were able to do was mobilize enough of their voters and sold far more independence than you would expect given the negative verdict on Biden by focusing their attention on issues like abortion, gun riot, gun issues and the threat to democracy.

The Trump and his movement present and so you got an election that was much closer to a standoff than to the kind of route that you would expect in a midterm where the president was in such a weakened position.

Someone said to me here last night I put Harvard for panel this afternoon that you thought you know I said history and gravity, gravity like gravity that yes calls you down argued for Republicans doing well.

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