Hi, I'm Bill Crystal. Welcome back to Conversations. I'm very pleased to be joined again. I guess four months ago, we had our first conversation by Witt Ares, the well-known Republican and deservedly well-known and respected.

Republican pollster and strategist, head of North Star opinion research, Witt's worked on many Senate campaigns, a couple of presidential campaigns in our Alexander. I think that's where we got to know each other reasonably well back in 96.

I guess that was and then the report of 2000 campaign will come back and talk maybe a little bit about the lessons of that.

Marco Rubio's campaign, Witt has a PhD in political science. I should mention that, but despite that is extremely sensible and intelligent about all matters.

Political and electoral. So, Witt, thanks for, thanks for joining me again.

Bill, great to be with you again. Always enjoyed.

Our conversation, we were now talking, speaking at the end of November, November 28th, we spoke on August 4th, so almost four months ago.

And that conversation I look back at, it says up pretty well. I think in terms of what would happen in the midterms.

And that we have two years to the presidential election and a pretty important and eventful one.

And I thought we could begin to help people think through what's going to happen over these next two years and so far as that's, that's predictable.

That's, that's okay. Surely, I don't know how predictable it is, but you've been through this before and you, you understand what happens in the off year, the odd number of year before the actual presidential year.

So, let's talk about that. Let's begin with the Republicans. I mean, what, what is the state of play? Do you think right now on the Republican nomination?

How has it changed from what you might have expected back when we spoke almost four months ago?

Well, this is an odd number of year and it's going to be a particularly odd odd number of year because we have never before had a former president who is leading candidate for his party's nomination in 2024.

The midterms came out just about what we expected bill.

We never saw the evidence for the red tsunami that a lot of people were talking about.

You know, my colleagues and I were looking at each other in the last week or so before the election going, are they, are they seeing something we're not seeing because we don't see it out there in the numbers.

The Senate races would just look so tight that they really were a coin flip. We expected the House to go Republican, but we didn't know by how much.

So all in all, it turned out about the way we expected, although the Republicans had an even more disappointing year, I think, then, then we thought going in.

They left a lot of seats on the table and it was primarily due to two factors. One was the dobs decision that really did energize a lot of Democrats, particularly women and younger people.

The abortion was a number one issue for voters under 30, for example.

And the other one, the major factor is the nomination of a whole lot of very weak inexperience first time mega aligned election to nine candidates.

...