Welcome. This is Anastasia Yuglova bringing you the Cato Daily Podcast.

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A forum at the Cato Institute on Thursday address the changes that will soon take place

on the political landscape as the 110th Congress begins at session in January.

With me I have Newsday columnist and political analyst James Pinkerton who spoke at the forum.

Why don't we begin by sharing some of your observations about this election?

Did anything surprise you?

Well, I think the big victor in the election

was the Reagan Democrats.

I think that the relentless pattern of American politics

has been that the swing vote is almost always socially conservative and

economically populist. They believe in family values, they believe in patriotism,

they hate the thought of losing foreign wars. They are suspicious of big government, but not

ideologically hostile to big government. They're not born hating big government. They just

think of government as sort of a tool that may or may not help them get a job and get an education.

They swing, they swing back and forth between the two parties based on whichever party seems

to be best serving them, or at least ill ill serving them at the time. So sometimes they

vote Democratic as in 1982 or 1996 and for the most of the last dozen years or so they've

been pretty solidly Republican, but the Republicans in 2006 had clearly

flunked the test on Iraq, on Katrina relief, again, where I think these swing

...