It is important that this election not be misinterpreted or misdiagnosed.

[Sympthsical]

19. It's this

The economy and Dobbs exerted balanced out osmotic pressure and kept things more or less in stasis.

I firmly believe without Dobbs, it would have been a bloodbath.

But you always saw in those national numbers a closeness that was highly unusual for a midterm with historic inflation.

I think seeing it through a partisan lens of Trump is insular. No one's going into the voting booth to vote against a guy who is not on the ballot. Not in this economy. Anyone who was doing that was going to vote for us anyway, because those are largely partisans to begin with. People vote where their lives are. A lot of women knew where their lives and rights were, and a lot of other people knew what was going on with their checking accounts.

That's it.

The democracy issue is a wash, because polling has showed that "threats to democracy" is a split issue that both sides glom onto fairly evenly. For every Defense of Democracy speech we got on our side, their side had a Kari Lake.