Hi, everyone and welcome to the latest episode of the UK In a Changing Europe podcast. I'm

Arlen Menon, Director of UK and a Changing Europe. I hope you'd know that by now. And today,

we're going to discuss the US election and its aftermath,

but from a very particular perspective, that of Gary O'Donoghue, who is the BBC's senior North

America correspondent. He's been in Washington in 2014. You'd have seen him all over your screens

during the election. I'm really looking forward to talking to him. Gary, welcome.

So, I mean,

there's loads I want to talk about. And in a sense, you know, as a political scientist,

this campaign has been analysed and sort of the data being poured over to death. But what I'm really interested in is sort of what you saw as a journalist in the US. So just to start off

with, we talk a lot about polarisation in the

US, how divided it is. I mean, from your experiences in the country, can you testify to that and

give us some examples of how that plays out in real life? There's a dilemma here, I think, for us

as journalists, because when you go out into the country and when you watch cable TV or

when you go to political rallies, you see that polarization very clearly. Americans tend to speak

very clearly. They tend to have very strong views. It's one of the sort of noticeable things in

my trade that when we go into the street to talk to people in the UK, you know,

it's hard to get people to talk to you. They run away, they hide, they duck. In America, they are

up for it and they got your microphone and they're going to say what they think. So you can get a sense

of what people think very clearly. Having said all that, when you look at some of the polling data that has been, you know, consistent down the years, you know, there's a lot of

issues in which, you know, there's a sort of 60% majority for things like the right to an abortion,

for example. Those things don't seem to play out in the public discourse or appear in the public

discourse. So there's always a sense that you're perhaps not reaching the middle ground voter, not finding

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