Hi, my name is Elena Moore. I am a producer on the NPR Politics podcast, and I am ending my summer by recording the podcast live at Zilke Hall in Houston.

This podcast was recorded on Thursday, September 15th at 8.08pm, Central Time. Things may have changed by the time you hear this.

Okay.

Hey there. This is the NPR Politics podcast live. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Asma Khaled. I also cover the White House.

I'm Ashley Lopez. I cover politics. And I'm Domenico Montanero, Senior Political Editor and Correspondent.

And we are here at Zilke Hall in Houston, Texas, and we've got some friends with us.

And I have to say it is so exciting to be back for the first time, our first live show back with an audience.

This is pretty cool. I mean, it's pretty cool as people hear. There's people up there. That's awesome. This is great.

So let's get down to it. Asma, we have said this many times, but midterms are typically a referendum on the president in power.

Look no further than 2018, 2014, 2010. All of them routes for the president's party.

And again, even a few months ago, 2022 looked to be shaping up that way as well.

President Biden had a stack of failures and near misses. But then recently, the president and his party have gotten a string of wins, right?

No, that's right. And I was speaking with a Democratic strategist probably back in January.

And I remember she was telling me that Democrats themselves were really nervous because there's the sense that it doesn't really matter how good of a local candidate you are.

You can't really like outperform the president of the United States approval, writing by 10 points. That's just not mathematically politically possible.

But I think the wins have shifted quite a bit in the last couple of months. Democrats have been really optimistic about some key pieces of legislation that they were able to pass.

There's the CHIPS Act that got semi-conductor manufacturing and production up. There's the PACT Act, which essentially expands veterans' benefits.

And then, of course, there's the Inflation Reduction Act, which is the big piece of legislation that Democrats were trying to pass for many, many months that I would say in some ways was going nowhere.

And that also because it was going nowhere, I think, exasperated some of the traditional Joe Biden base of supporters.

So, you know, look, I've spent some time, both covering the White House, but also traveling around the country.

One of the things I will say is I consistently heard this level of frustration from Democratic base voters, often young voters who felt like they gave the president control of the Senate, they gave the president control of Congress, and they elected a Democratic president, and yet they weren't getting tangible relief.

That, I think, has fundamentally changed since the Inflation Reduction Act passed, but even more notably, to be honest, once the president announced some level of student loan debt forgiveness.

...