Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Americano podcast, a special series of discussions about the biggest political event of this year, the 2016 US presidential election.

My name is Freddie Gray and I'm Deputy Entering the Spectator. I'm joined today by Thomas Frank, who in my opinion is the best writer on the American left.

He writes about the interplay between American politics and culture, and he's most famous for his book, What's the Matter of Kansas?

His latest book is addressed to the crisis that's going on within the Democratic Party, and it's called Listen to the Ball, whatever happened to the Party of the People.

In this episode, we're going to talk about Hillary Clinton and what her presidency might look like. Tom, there's a sense, I think, in America and certainly

abroad, that after Trump's fairly spectacularly bad performance in the debate on Monday night,

that the election is now back into strong favoritism for Hillary Clinton. Is that the impression you have?

Yes, but I don't think it ever, you know, Hillary Clinton ever stopped being a strong

favorite.

She has, by all the conventional standards, you know, she should win this thing.

And she's been ahead since the very beginning.

And it's never really been close.

Now, he has from time to time got within five points of

her or so in the popular in the polls but you know look these things are decided aren't aren't

decided that way they're decided in a sort of state by state way and it depends on on you know

how you get the vote out and what kind of machine you

have you know what kind of operation you have i should say and uh it's not clear to me that trump has

has anything yes and she's obviously got this very formidable machine yeah that's right is that the

police in in london that's the police in london i thought they had a different siren over there.

No.

No, we copy American sirens now.

That's so depressing.

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