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Welcome to the politics guys. I'm political scientist Michael Baranowski, an emeritus professor at North Kentucky University.

I'm joined today by political scientist Michael Levy, and Michael and I, a few weeks ago,

we had the introductory episode of this New Rules of Politics series where we just sort of laid

out the groundwork.

And today we're finally getting to the first of these new rules of politics, which really

actually is an old rule of politics,

that is still a rule of politics, right, Michael?

I can definitely agree with that.

And the rule, to put it simply, is follow the money.

And I don't think it's any surprise to anyone.

It shouldn't be, I don't think, that this is the first rule. It's maybe the

most obvious rule, but I'd like to think there are ways to look at and understand money in

politics that maybe aren't exactly intuitive, at least not necessarily for everyone.

Yeah, so thanks, Mike.

Even though I should preface this initial conversation that we have about money,

that I find the amount of money in politics to be absolutely disgusting.

And if my math was correct, and of course, I'll always be okay to be fact-checked,

I found that it was about $23 billion was raised and spent in the 2024 electoral cycle by presidential candidates, congressional

candidates, political parties, you know, packs outside money. So I'm really glad that we're

...