This is a Cato Special Podcast. I'm Caleb Brown.

There is a lot about the election of this year that we still don't know,

but the big picture seems to be pretty clear Republicans didn't have the election day

they wanted, and the more conspiratorially

minded Republicans fared worse than the rest. Emily Ekins directs polling at the Cato

Institute she gave me her takes on the election and what did and did not influence voters.

A whole lot of this election is still up in the air that is control of the Senate,

the margin of victory in an expected Republican takeover of the House and of course all the

activity at the at the state level some of that still needs to be determined but what are

your initial thoughts having looked at some of the data about this election?

So a couple of things. First, historically speaking, going into midterms, the out party, meaning the party that is not in the presidency, tends to pick

up seats. There are a few exceptions to this, like George W Bush in 2002, the Republicans picked

up seats despite a Republican being in the

presidency but typically the out party picks up seats has happened in 2010 with

Barack Obama Republicans gained like 60 seats the Democrats had a bit of a blue wave in 2018 when

Donald Trump was president and so going into this everyone would just expect

Republicans would pick up seats going in, but there's more than that. The economy is not doing well.

We have extremely high levels of inflation over the past several years, high gas prices, high interest rates, and

more than that we have a disliked president.

Most people do not approve of President Biden or the job that he's doing.

And on the issues that they say they care about, inflation, the economy jobs, they say they

trust Republicans more than Democrats to address these issues.

...