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 Editor of The Spectator.

Today I'm joined by Grover Norquist, who is founder and president of Americans for Tax Reform,

and he's also known as the most influential conservative in Washington.

So Grover, we spoke on Election Day, and I think, although you never said anything one way or the other,

I think it's fair to say you didn't sound too optimistic.

How surprised were you by the result?

Well, I assumed we'd hold the House.

I think we lost seven seats, although some of that may be disputed, but close to seven seats in the House.

But we had a very comfortable margin to begin with.

My hopes on Election Day were that we would hold the Senate so that if we ended up with Hillary

Clinton as president, we could stop her from controlling the courts.

In point of fact, I was surprised, pleasantly surprised, when Trump was able to win in Florida,

Pennsylvania, Wisconsin.

Iowa had looked good for some time.

But I mean, I had just been looking at the normal polling data

and seeing that the polling data showed Hillary ahead

in all the key states you need to win,

and that the ground game was reportedly so much stronger for Hillary than for Trump.

And that lastly, that there'd been this outpouring of votes that were assumed to be Democrat

votes.

So not just the polling numbers, but the establishment press was saying, oh, look at all the turnout in Florida.

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