Um, shoot Tony, I just touched the the angle. Did I mess everything up?

Continuity error.

I know. The reddit, they're going to be going crazy.

Everyone's gone now.

Hello and welcome to the 538 Politics Podcast. I'm Chadwick Matlin. A deputy editor at 538.

Galen is out six so we're improvising here. And on today's show we'll be discussing God,

COVID and the midterm. So the usual stuff for this podcast. We'll dive into a new poll about

whom Americans blame for misfortune. Is it a higher power or just the unending, uncontrollable,

unyielding chaos of the universe as we live in it? And then we'll pivot to what causes so much

of our misfortune these days, COVID-19. I namely will discuss the Omicron variant of the novel

coronavirus, how concerned Americans are and should be and what it might mean for politics in

the coming months. And then finally, it's time for the horse-race stuff. Who's running in 2022?

Who's not? And what that tells us about how politicians are sizing up their chances in the midterms

and beyond. And I have a feeling that Stacey Abrams, Beto Ework and Dr. Oz will all be mentioned.

So a lot on our plate, Celestial, the existential, the terrestrial, and to help us make a sense of it all,

are three of my colleagues, politics editor Sarah Frostensen. Hi Sarah.

Hi Chad. Glad you could be with us. And we've got senior writer and legal reporter Amelia Thompson

DeVoe. Hello Amelia. Hey Chad. And Aleption's analyst Jeffrey Skelly. Hi Jeff.

Hey Chad. All right guys, let's begin with Goodusa Pulling, which this week is prompted by a new

poll from Pew Research Center about faith and finding explanations for inethical tragedy,

essentially. She asked 6,500 people about the philosophical questions that we walk around with

every day, the kind of thing that you maybe spend hours discussing, I don't know, like on the

...