Hello from Washington. I'm Chuck Todd, and this is the Chuck Toddcast. So once again, it is our favorite time of year. Certainly it is mine, and we are going to speak in the Royal Week because I think the entire team likes it. And no, I'm not talking about the holidays. It's time for our what-if series of alternative history scenarios.

We've done this for a few years now.

We've got quite the archive of alternative histories, butterfly effects, you name it.

In past years, we've talked about JFK's assassination.

We've also asked, what if Bill Clinton had resigned in 1998 rather than fight the Lewinsky impeachment?

We even talked about what would have happened if King Edward didn't abdicate during World War II and what that would have done to the Allies' efforts in Europe.

We have had a ton of listener questions come in.

We've had a ton of suggestions.

And we're going to get into them with four special episodes this year. So we appreciate everyone who wrote in with an alternative history scenario for us. A few of them, as you notice, we've dabbled in as essentially as Q&As at the end of previous podcast because we didn't we weren't ready to make them full

episodes yet. One theme though that did stick out from your questions is what if the 2024 election

had played out differently. It's a little bit of an ironic question because the 2024 election

sometimes seemed like the ultimate what if election. What if scenarios actually got implemented? What if a candidate dropped

out in the middle after the primary season? What if the convention chose the next candidate?

Well, we did a lot of those what ifs this year. But we still received dozens of questions on that

topic. So we're going to dig into that whole category of 2020-2020-the-2020-what-ifs today.

So I had to pick somebody special to do this with, and it's Jonathan Martin.

He's a senior political columnist at Politico.

Jonathan and I had worked together 20-plus years ago at the hotline.

We've been having what-if conversations about politics,

essentially for most of our adult lives. Both of both he and I have known each other longer than

we've known our wives. That's sort of how much we've been talking politics. And so,

J-Mart, I appreciate you doing this with me. I know you love a good what-if scenario.

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