(upbeat music) - Most of you likely know Amy Walter from her weekly appearances on the PBS NewsHour, Politics Monday, where she offers frank and insightful analysis of national politics.

But that's really just a side gig.

By day, Amy Walter is editor in chief and publisher of the Cook Political Report with Amy Walter.

She also has connections to Maine.

She was a graduate of Colby College, summa cum laude, thank you very much, and is on the board of trustees there as well.

I'm joined by my colleague Kevin Miller, who is Maine Public State House correspondent.

Kevin has covered Maine politics for more than 10 years.

First, at the Bangor Daily News, then at the Portland Press Herald, and now with us here at Maine Public.

Amy, welcome.

- Thank you so much.

It's great to be here.

- I thought what I would start with is kind of a big question, with this term midterm election, what did we learn about the American electorate?

- Yeah, it's an excellent question, and I think what we learn every election is important.

It takes us sometimes a step forward, sometimes it's that moment in time.

So you have to be very careful about assuming that patterns we see in one election are gonna continue in another.

But what we learned, I thought, that was fascinating about this election is that voters normally in a midterm election, they use it as an opportunity to send a verdict to the sitting president and his party, especially when that president's party has control of both the House and the Senate.

And to say either things are going off on the wrong track or we think things are doing okay, but it's very difficult for the party in the White House to make the case that the election is as much about the other party as it is about them, that's what this election though actually was.

It was much more of a choice election than a referendum on the sitting president.

And we learned that voters were willing to vote for Democratic candidates even though they didn't approve of the job the president was doing, right?

If all you told me going into this election, you didn't tell me anything about who the candidates were or even who the president was, but just said, the president's job approval rating's at 43%, inflation is at 8%, 75% of the country thinks that we're headed in the wrong direction.

60%+ of Americans think that we're currently in a recession.

And when asked, who's doing a better job on the economy and on inflation, Republicans win that argument in some cases by double digits, you'd say, well, it's not really very complicated, is it?

About how this election's gonna turn out for the party in power, except that the election for voters was really about choosing, in some cases, to vote for a status quo that they didn't really like because they saw that the other party was the bigger risk.

- Amy.

- Oh, I'm going back and forth.

- You are going back and forth.

- Both sides.

- So Amy, you've been writing all year about what you've been calling meh voters, and I love that.

- Thanks.

- Can you explain a little bit more about what you mean by that, by meh voters?

- Yeah.

- And how did that vote on Tuesday?

- Yeah, so meh, right?

We all know it's like (indistinct).

Not so good, it's hard to do.

You can't really put it...

I put it in quotes but you have to think about it in your head of like, eh, it's not good, it's not bad, it's not...

But so what I noticed in September was that Pew Research put out this survey, and as many holsters do when they ask about the president and how you feel about him, they ask like a four point question, right?

Do you strongly approve, somewhat approve, somewhat disapprove, strongly disapprove.

And what was interesting was that the people who said that they somewhat disapproved were actually voting for Democrats.

And I thought, huh, that's odd.

I wonder if that's ever happened before.

And I asked the folks at Pew if they could go back and look at other midterm polls in previous elections and they were able to find four different midterms where they had enough data.

And it was pretty clear that this was a brand new thing, that for the most part we know, and especially in recent times, if you dislike the job the president's doing, 90% of the folks who say that they dislike the job the president's doing, they end up voting for the other party.

If you like what the president's doing, you feel pretty good about him, 90% of those folks gonna vote for that president's party.

Now, the somewhat disapproves and somewhat approvers are not as solidly behind, they're not always at 90, but ultimately, it works out to be the case.

This year, What we found was that there was a significant group of voters who maybe thought that the president wasn't doing a particularly good job or didn't think he was doing a good job on the economy, but they chose to vote for Democrats anyway, in this case, they voted for Democrats by four points.

When you go back and you look at 2018, that same group of voters who just somewhat disapproved of Trump, they voted basically against Republicans or four Democrats by 30 points.

So that's a pretty significant change.

The other group of people who were meh, were people who said that they didn't feel good about the economy but they also didn't think the economy was terrible.

They said, it's not so good, right?

44% of Americans, at least in this AP vote cast survey taken on election said it's not so good.

But Democrats won those voters by a pretty significant margin.

So ultimately, we think of, well, how people feel about the economy, how people feel about the President, that is a driver of their vote.

But in this case, people were willing to say, yeah I'm not happy with the way things are going in the country but for whatever reason, it'll be fun to find these people and to ask them how they did this, but how they were making this decision to say, I'm not crazy about what's happening in Washington with Democrats but I'm choosing to stick with them.

I think a big part of the reason they chose to stick with them is because they saw the alternative as even less appealing, right?

Now, some of these people could have been Democrats that, they were gonna vote for a Democrat no matter what, even though they didn't think very highly, they don't think very highly of the president or of the economy.

But I think a lot of these people were independent voters.

And we saw that too, that was the other thing that really stood out this election.

Every midterm election we've had since 2006, that party that's not in the White House, so the out party has won independent voters by double digits, that's how you win big numbers on election night.

When we talk about wave elections, it's not just that one side turned out their voters, right?

Oh, all the Republicans turned out, all the Democrats turned out, that's helpful, you can turn out your base and do okay.

But to really win and win by a big margin, you've got to win among independents.

And this year, not only did Republicans not win independents by double digits, they didn't win independent voters.

They lost some anywhere from two to four points, depending on which exit poll you're looking at.

And in these key Senate races like Arizona and New Hampshire and others, the democratic candidate won independent voters by double digits.

That to me, is the most instructive thing about this election or what we learned.

It feels like we just kind of reran 2020, and God, we just keep rerunning, 2016 and 2020 over and over again.

In part, if you think about who did really poorly in this election, on the Republican side, they were candidates who were running in the swing states that Biden carried in the 2020 election.

So we had a number of Republican candidates who had some serious flaws and yet, some of them still won, right?

The ones that still won, won in states that Trump carried in 2020, like Ohio or North Carolina.

The places they lost were the swing disk, the swing states like Arizona, like New Hampshire.

And we essentially, I think what we learned is that if you're going to re-run 2020, you're gonna get a similar outcome.

So if you're gonna run a Trump-like candidate in a swing state, that candidate's probably gonna get the same percent of the vote as Donald Trump did.

What Republicans were hoping was that even though, yeah, Trump didn't win in these places and yeah, maybe independents aren't crazy about Donald Trump, they'll be so upset about the economy and Biden's handling of it, that they'll overlook that, right?

This isn't about 2020, this is about now, Donald Trump's not President, Biden is president, all true.

But it was no longer theoretical what it would look like to have a Trump-like candidate in those states because they had voted just two years prior sending that message that, eh, we're not really into that, right?

And we were talking about this off stage, but it's as if many Republican candidates just said, oh, well, we wanna just have more cowbell, right?

Like more of whatever we did in 2020, we should just keep doing that, even though it didn't work, right?

Like if you lose and then say, what should we do differently?

Nothing, let's just do the same thing.

(audience laughing) And then you get the same answer, we shouldn't be all that surprised by that.

It's my take.

- I wanna ask you about the role of abortion because I can't tell you leading up to the election day, how many political scientists, how many analysts I heard say, women care about abortion, but they care about inflation more.

- Right.

- I mean, I didn't hear anybody say anything else.

It kind of appears that women do care about abortion and they vote.

- Yeah, I mean, I think we didn't... (audience laughs and applauds) I don't think anybody knew what to make of the issue because we've never had anything like this before.

But it also made a bigger difference as an issue in different states, which we also kind of knew as well, right?

So in a state like Michigan where they had, literally the issue of abortion was on the ballot.

They had a referendum on the ballot, plus you have a Republican-led legislature, a democratic governor and the Republican gubernatorial nominee very much on the anti-abortion side of the ledger, including rape and incest and things like that.

So in that state where the issue of abortion was literally front and center and where it was pretty clear that whoever won the governorship and the state legislature, whoever was gonna be the attorney general and whatever was gonna happen with this ballot initiative would have a literal direct impact.

And that the issue of abortion, I think from the exit polls in a state like Michigan, was the number one issue there.

But think about other states where we know we've had action on the issue, where the legislature has actually moved forward, put more restrictive laws into place, Texas or Georgia or Ohio, they still elected Republicans in all of those states.

And where the abortion issue was not as high of a priority in those states as it was in say, Michigan or a Pennsylvania, where that was a front and center issue.

So I think fundamentally what the issue did is it certainly helped to, one, give democratic voters that sort of focus on something that was...

It's not just that it was a critical issue, but I think it helped to put something really tangible on the ballot, right?

That this isn't... Let me say it this way, one of the hardest things about making a midterm election about the other party is it's always theoretical, right?

Like, well, if you let Democrats get in, they're gonna do these terrible things.

If you let Republicans get into power, they're gonna do these terrible things.

But I think for many voters, they're like, well, how do I know that's really gonna happen?

And I'm focused on the here and now, you're in power, you did this or you didn't do that and that's what I'm voting on.

But on this issue, it wasn't theoretical, it was literally like, it is going to be decided in these states, especially in states, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, where you have divided government, and where in some of those cases you have those trigger laws that take you back to laws written earlier.

But in some of the either bluer states or redder states where that issue had either been already decided, it was an important issue, but it wasn't as important.

So I think it had a different impact in different parts of the country.

- Do we know what percentage of the voters were women in this last election, and if that's higher than other midterm elections?

- No, it seems like it's the same.

And we didn't have a bigger gender gap in this election than we had in previous elections.

But I don't know if we can also make it just about women voting on it, I think there were a lot of men voting on this issue as well.

Part of the challenge we have too, I wanna just put a big caveat out there, we're looking at exit polls and incomplete data right now.

We eventually will get all of the data and probably do a deeper dive on it but there's no doubt that the issue helped to mobilize and energize a democratic electorate that wasn't quite as engaged in the midterms, in the electoral sort of political milia as Republicans were.

And its impact, as I said, you can see some of it directly in some of these states but I think even indirectly, it had the the impact of really motivating and engaging voters.

- Kind of building off that same topic, here in Maine, we saw former Governor, LePage lost pretty big, by about 11 points.

And during what was as much of a concession speech as we got from him, he basically accused Maine voters of putting abortion ahead of heating oil, and we're having record high heating oil prices here in Maine.

But I guess my question for you is that, in either or situation for voters, where they're going into the voter booth to vote on abortion or economic issues or, I've heard a lot of people talk this week about that voters can walk and shoot gun at the same time.

- That's right.

That voters are are a lot more sophisticated than we give them credit for, and we're asking them to make a binary choice even though we don't live in a world where we can do that all the time, right?

You have to do this and that.

But I think we are looking at, right now only one incumbent governor has lost thus far, and by a very narrow margin, the governor in Nevada, it was a really good year actually for incumbent governors.

And I think it is difficult to beat an incumbent governor unless that governor has done something or has not done something so egregious that there's an easy case to be made.

I find it kind of remarkable too, this is the COVID governor cohort, and you would've thought that that alone could have been sort of more of an issue.

If you had said in 2021, what do you think the issues gonna be in governors races?

You'd say, well, absolutely the response to COVID, but now we have inflation, now we have abortion and we have a whole bunch of other issues that also became really important to voters.

But I think for LePage, the biggest challenge was always to say, well, why now?

What are you gonna do that is either better or different?

Or how are you going to... Give us a reason why we should be firing Janet Mills.

And that is the bigger challenge when you are running against an incumbent, you have to make the case that this person deserves to be fired.

And that is, I think a lot of people think it's easier to do than it actually is, but here we are.

- Let's talk a little about the youth vote.

I think the conventional wisdom is that young people don't vote.

Is that changing?

What do exit polls tell us about that?

- So I went back and I looked at the exit polls and one thing about the youth vote, just to make us all feel a little bit older right now, is that like millennials, right?

Some of them are turning 40, right?

Like they're adults.

(audience laughing) I mean, maybe now that on my age, I think 40 would be great, but they're buying houses and raising families and stuff.

So these, many of these folks were, right?

Their first experience in politics might have been the 2008 campaign or being raised in that era.

But if we just look then at the youngest voters, so 18 to 29 year olds, which that's the Gen Z and younger millennials, they turned out as a percent of the electorate, they weren't any bigger or any smaller than they were in 2018 or in 2014.

The difference in those three elections was in the 2018 elections, they voted by a bigger margin for Democrats, but this year, they voted by a much bigger margin than they did say in 2014.

So they turned out at the same rate, which I think some people were worried they weren't gonna turn out, so that's always worrisome.

And they gave a bigger margin to Democrats than they did back in 2014, which was a really bad year for Democrats, especially on the Senate side.

So I think, yes, it was an important component of it.

I do think too, again, as we go through, we're gonna sift through all the data, we're gonna try to figure out, and it will be months from now, who actually turned out and why they turned out.

Maybe we won't always get the why but we'll have a better sense of who turned out.

This was the argument that Democrats made to me and to some others, at the very beginning of this election, which was to say, we know we have a coalition that has come, shown up, and when they vote, they vote and elect Democrats.

They showed up in 2018, they showed up in 2020.

There's no reason we can't get them to show up again in 2024.

And it's a combination of, right?

They're young voters, they are independent voters, they are voters who many of them sat out 2016 because they didn't like either of their choices, or maybe they voted third party in 2016.

Maybe some of them are newly registered since 2016.

So this is that coalition.

Now, usually one of the challenges about keeping a coalition together from year to year is that it's very personality based, right?

We would joke that the Obama coalition was a real coalition that turned out when Barack Obama was on the ballot, but they're not gonna turn out for Democrats, right?

Or the Trump Coalition turns out, but they really turn out when he's on the ballot.

In this case, the coalition that turned out in 2018 and gave Democrats their big wins in the house, and the coalition that turned out and gave Joe Biden the presidency, they were voting as much against Trump or Trumpism as they were voting to support the Democratic candidates.

And so the more that the election became about not just Biden and the economy, but also became about what's Donald Trump doing?

What happened in Mar-a-Lago?

What about this January 6th commission?

Who are these people he's endorsing?

Who are these election denier folks, right?

And about the other issues surrounding what it means to have control of government, what's gonna happen with abortion rights?

All of those things, I think helped to engage those same voters, that same coalition, because they weren't saying, come out, you've gotta come out and vote for Democrats so that they can pursue the Biden agenda.

In 2010 and in 2014, the call from Democrats was, please young people, remember Barack Obama, he's still super cool, remember how you voted for him and he won and that was great, so we need you to do that again but do it for candidates that are running for Congress.

And it was like, what?

And then Obama runs and they're like, "Oh, okay, he's running.

Well, I'll go and vote."

Right?

They didn't show up again in 2014.

So when that personality based coalition, it's really hard to turn out in a midterm year.

But if that coalition is really driven by being against those things that I just mentioned or being energized by those issues, then it's a coalition that can come together, that doesn't rely on Joe Biden being a rock star or even being particularly popular.

- Speaking of 2024, no surprise, we got a lot of questions from people about what your thoughts are- - Really?

- About whether- - I'm surprised by that.

- President Trump will will announce.

But you know, this goes along those same lines of, this year, I think you tweeted recently that this year that Republicans didn't have the advantage of bringing out the Trump voters like they did.

You know, this was like a Trump MAGA voters were not coming out because he was not on the ballot.

Now, if he is on the ballot, I guess first question is you know, do you think he will be on the ballot in 2024?

And if he is, what does that mean for republicans?

Do they then benefit from having him on the ballot?

- Well, this is gonna be an interesting two weeks, isn't it?

(audience laughing softly) We've got control of the Senate.

We should know pretty soon.

I mean, obviously, we have a runoff on December 6th in Georgia.

But if the Nevada race is called for the Democrat, it's still an important race in Georgia, but it does not determine the majority.

So we'll have that.

I don't know how long it's gonna take before we absolutely positively know what the final margin is in the house and what the final numbers are there.

But, so what this means, of course, is that Republicans already are having a challenging time trying to figure out, literally getting their house in order in Congress.

Who's gonna be in leadership?

How is this gonna work?

And so they're dealing with that over here.

And then you have Donald Trump, who I assume he's going ahead with his announcement that his super special maybe I'm running, maybe kind of, I'm definitely for sure, almost certainly, definitely running.

(audience laughing softly) Which is what he was doing at the lead up, the run up to the midterms that he announces, which makes a whole lot of sense for him.

I think he really wants to get out ahead of everybody else, first of all, and kind of rewrite the narrative or at least redirect the narrative, right.

The narrative for the last four days has not been good for Donald Trump.

And it's not just coming from sort of the pundit world, but it's coming from within his own party, right.

The call is coming from inside the house.

Like people within his party are saying, and on the record, you cost us a good election.

And so that's not where he wants to be.

He needs to now say, whoa, whoa, whoa I'm gonna run and I want everybody to realize that I am still the biggest, strongest most formidable candidate in this race.

And I kind of expect him to do that.

And then the next question becomes, what does this mean for everybody else on the Republican side and what they decide to do?

And you know, there are all kinds of theories.

One is that, you know, Trump wins because it's a crowded primary, just like we had in 2016.

And even though he doesn't have a majority of support from the Republican base, he has a big enough core of voters that he's able to get through while the other candidates split the anti-Trump or the we want someone different vote.

But I could also see a scenario where it looks maybe a little bit more like 2008 where you had Hillary Clinton as the absolute front runner.

You have Barack Obama as the rising star.

And in this case the rising star on the Republican side would be Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida.

And then you had a lot of other big names.

Obviously, you had Joe Biden in there and you had the governor of New Mexico, Bill Richardson.

You know, there were a lot of big names in the mix in that 2008 race.

But very quickly it became a two person race between Obama and Hillary Clinton.

You could see maybe something like that happening in '24 if it just becomes the DeSantis v Trump, rather than it being Trump and DeSantis and 17 other candidates.

So we have that question.

We also have the question looming over all this.

What is the Department of Justice gonna do?

What's gonna happen in Fulton County?

They're obviously still ongoing investigations and legal action that could be taken against Donald Trump.

So that too, we can't sort of forget is sitting out there.

But I expect him to run.

Does he make it to the ballot as the nominee?

Meh, I dunno.

(audience laughing softly) I dunno.

If I knew that I'd be in Vegas right now I'd be making a lot of money.

- Let's go back to talking about Congress for a little bit because no matter how the next week plays out, they're gonna be tight margins.

- Yeah.

- What does this mean?

- Never seen anything like that.

- Are we gonna see gridlock or is it going to be as President Biden hopes, some bipartisan working together?

- Yeah.

(audience laughing loudly) I'm not, I'm not gonna be thinking we're gonna see a lot of bipartisan working together.

But I mean, we've got some big, the big fundamental question is can it actually function?

I mean, there's the, you're right.

There's a question of can we see Congress working to solve our big problems, right.

Oh, here's an opportunity now to fix immigration or to work on healthcare.

But right now I think it's literally can they keep the lights on?

Can we get government funding?

Can we ensure that the debt ceiling is lifted and we don't default on our debt?

Can we ensure that just like the basic running of government is okay?

Right, we're like smoothly able to do that.

So I think we start with that.

And then if you're the the president, how much time do you spend trying to negotiate with a divided Congress, if that's indeed what happens, or you know, a very narrowly, you have a very narrow majority in the Senate, you just can't do much of anything.

So how much time do you spend doing that versus focusing on the things that a president can do, right.

Through either executive authority or by focusing on the laws that have already passed, but will be implemented over the next year.

Spending, you know, the president spent a whole lot of time this year going around the country to places where the infrastructure money was was being put into, you know, bridges and roads and all those.

He loved showing up at wherever bridge was being built or whatever.

So you can continue to do that piece of the, you know, moving forward on the implementation of that as well as, you know, you still have your executive authority within your agencies as well.

And so that's where I think you're gonna see a lot of that focus.

If the other question for Republicans getting a majority, even the slimmest of majority, is what do they decide to do with it?

Do they use it as an opportunity to, they just do oversight that's focused on Biden himself, right?

Going after Biden personally, or members of the cabinet, or others?

Or do they use it as a way to say, hey, we should use this opportunity an oversight to actually tackle the questions that didn't get answered under democratic control, right?

We wanna talk more about immigration and what's going on on the border.

We wanna know more about what happened in Afghanistan.

We wanna know more.

But what voters are gonna say is, what we really wanna know about is what are you doing on the economy, right.

How are we getting together to fix this?

So I think the challenge for Republicans and having the smallest of majorities is that they're gonna spend so much time, and there will be a lot of focus on the process, if there's the infighting and all of the drama, that it drowns out anything else that they would really like to talk about.

- I guess given how close the margins are gonna be in both the house and the Senate, where do you see moderates like Senator Susan Collins and Maine representative, Jared Golden- - Yeah.

- Presuming he wins his ranked choice runoff next week.

Where do you see them fitting in?

Are they, are they dinosaurs?

Do they have more influence?

- I mean, you can argue they have more influence now than ever, right.

Because their votes become absolutely critical in, well, maybe another way to say this is everybody's vote is, right.

When there're only 219 or 220 votes, everyone above 218 is the most critical, right.

So anybody can say that they are the deciding vote.

But I think if you take a lesson away from this election for those moderates, who were the most successful candidates this cycle, especially on the house side.

If you look at the Democrats who did well, who were running in districts that, I mean, Golden's is the most Republican, but there were a number of other Democrats running in districts that maybe Biden won very narrowly or by a point or two, in places like Minnesota and Virginia, they ran as well and as governed as moderates its in that same class as Jared Golden, sort of running with the same type of message, which is I'm here to get things done.

I'm here to work in a bipartisan way.

I'm here to sort of put my nose to the grindstone.

I'm not here to be performative.

I'm not here to just, you know, toe the party line.

All of those candidates were successful.

So you can say, well, they were rewarded.

And that, I hope, is something we take away from this, which is to say to those candidates who are doing the hard work of being either a bridge builder, or willing to work with the other side, or even just willing to say, you know, I'm not going to, I don't think our party should be doing X, we should be doing Y instead.

People who are really willing to do the work, get reelected.

I'm hoping that that sends a message that, yes, voters will reward you if you do the right thing.

So we had two really interesting messages from this election, right.

You had the Republicans who stood up against Trump, voted to impeach him.

Almost all of them lost.

And we still are waiting for one more, this one race to be decided in Washington state.

But Democrats have picked up one of those seats of the impeacher, Republican impeacher who lost, might pick up another one of a Republican impeacher who lost.

Because Republicans then nominated very, you know, candidates who were much more on the extreme, certainly not in the mold of the candidates who had been there, the incumbents who had been there.

And so the consequence of ridding your party of people who are willing to say things about you that you don't always like, of ridding any of the, calling them heretics instead of admitting that sometimes it's good to have somebody in your party that has a different perspective, or different point of view, or comes from a different part of the country.

When you get rid of all those people and replace them with folks who are outside of the mainstream, there's a consequence and there's a penalty for that.

There's a clear penalty for that in the Senate, and could cost, it looks like it's likely to cost Republicans control of the Senate.

And it also had a cost on the house side, both in seats that Republicans lost but also seats that Democrats were able to hold.

- Kevin and I both have a pile of questions.

- Uh-oh, great.

- From the audience from you.

And I'm gonna start, Amy, with a personal question.

Somebody wants to know, is your head about to explode?

(audience laughing loudly) - I know.

No, that's a good question.

(audience laughing loudly) I think after the last four years, it takes a lot now to make anything explode.

Also, I have a teenager, so I have a level of tolerance now that much higher than I expected.

So thank you for that, thank you.

(audience clapping loudly) - They're concerned about you.

- [Amy] Yeah, I know, I appreciate that, thank you.

- I asked about former President Trump.

Do you think President Biden's going to run again?

- I know, I mean, I don't know.

I don't think anybody knows.

Look, I think he's in a better, President Biden's in a much better place than he was, say, when the talk of two weeks ago, right.

And you, again, it wasn't just Republicans who were saying that they were expecting to have a good night.

There were a lot of Democrats who were saying both on the record and privately to a bunch of us and to other reporters, you know, how bad this is gonna be for Democrats.

What is that gonna mean for Joe Biden to have been the president during a really bad midterm?

Is that only gonna speed up the conversation about he should be replaced, we should have somebody else on the ballot?

I don't know that that conversation, it's been shelved maybe, let's put it that way.

So now all the focus that we thought was gonna be on how is Biden gonna react to this, how are Democrats gonna react to this, is now back onto what is going on in the house.

What's gonna happen with Kevin McCarthy?

What's gonna happen, you know, with the Senate majority?

And what's gonna happen with Trump?

So I don't know that we've actually solved for, okay, well, this means that everybody's on the democratic side is all lined up and ready to go with Biden.

Even in those exit polls, what you see among Democrats is they're still not very excited about the prospect of another Biden term, right.

They're voting for Democrats.

They consider themselves Democrats.

They don't wanna see a Donald Trump elected president.

But they also aren't feeling it.

- They're meh.

- They're meh.

(audience laughing softly) Totally meh.

But so then the follow up is, okay, fine.

Well, is somebody gonna challenge him?

Right.

And who would that be?

Who's willing to go and do that?

Is he going to pull a LBJ and just say, right, go and give a press conference and announce that he's not running?

I mean, all of these are possible.

We've just never been here before.

Somebody wrote this a few weeks back, I thought it was a perfect distillation of 2024 and the options here.

It's like what we have, we have these two front runners that are in this dysfunctional codependent relationship.

(audience laughing loudly) Trump and Biden, right.

And like Biden is, well, I'm gonna run if Trump runs.

And Trump's like, well, I gotta be able to beat Biden, right.

And so they're both kind of, they're here kind of stuck in this moment.

The question is, how do you, one, how does that get unstuck?

Especially when majority of voters are like, I don't want that rerun.

Like I saw version one, we don't need, or maybe not rerun, but we don't, either rerun or version number two, the sequel of 2020, we don't want that.

So voters are pretty clear they want to see two different nominees.

But what do the party, well, there's the party leaders or people who are the establishment figures within those parties, are they willing to take on and challenge their front runners?

And then what do the voters in those parties decide that they wanna do?

Are they willing to take a chance on maybe a candidate who we don't know much about, right?

Not a big name who runs to say, well, let's try this out.

That, to me, is the most fascinating piece of our process going forward.

And we're trying to have that conversation at the same time, as we just discussed, with how do you possibly manage a house that has literally just 219 members or 220 members, right.

You're only two, you have a two seat or a one seat majority.

All it takes is a resignation, or someone's sick, or someone dies.

And now, what happens?

We just, we haven't been here before.

Like this, 2023 is gonna be absolutely wild.

- You have anticipated the next question.

- Oh, which is?

- Are Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy going to face real leadership challenges?

- Well, they already have, especially McCarthy who's trying to lock it down as quickly as he can.

I don't think that McConnell will lose a leadership election, and I don't think that McCarthy will either.

Part of it is what sorts of concessions does he have to make to get the votes.

And some of it too is where are the members in terms of, if not McCarthy, then who.

There's the number two, Steve Scalise, who, you know, maybe he has a little bit of a better relationship with some of the more conservative members.

But I don't know if it's that much better.

And the other thing is, honestly, who would want that job, right?

Like, you know what's ahead of you.

You have a one, or if it turns out this way, you have a one or a two seat majority that you've gotta manage.

And then look back when republicans had much bigger majorities, with John Bayer or with Paul Ryan, and they still couldn't keep the caucus, you know, organized, and focused, and disciplined.

Now do it with this.

I mean, that is an impossible, impossible job.

I don't know that I would want to be the person that says like, yeah, I'd love to do it.

You might wanna be the person that comes after that, right.

Like you go, and then if everything looks terrible and you do a terrible job of it, then I'll come in and be the cleanup.

- So a topic that didn't get a lot of attention during the election, but is kind of hanging over globally.

This person asks, please discuss the prospect of support for Ukraine under the- - [Amy] Yeah.

- To determined to be determined makeup of Congress.

- Yeah, that's a really good question because it kind of arose during the midterms where you were starting to hear some Republican members, I mean, most notably somebody who said it out loud was Marjorie Taylor Greene saying, you know, Republicans take control, we're not gonna spend any more money on Ukraine.

You had leadership on the Republican side come out pretty quickly and tamp that down.

So I think though the fact that Republicans do not have what they thought was gonna be this big majority, makes it harder for somebody like a Marjorie Taylor Greene to say we shouldn't be, you know, agreeing to fund more money or resources for Ukraine.

I think on the Republican side, on the Senate, there are still voices, enough voices there supporting that.

And I think the fact when you have breakthroughs like we've had this week of Russians pulling out certain areas, that also makes it a tougher sell to say, well, now after all this and they're succeeding, we're no longer going to provide support.

At the end of the day, this is one of those conversations that I think will be out there in the mix.

But it seems like the energy around, okay, a new Republican majority coming in and they're gonna upset the entire apple cart.

That's not there now because they just don't have the numbers to be able to deliver on that.

- This person writes only about 20 to 30 of the 435 house seats were competitive.

What do we do to get more competition?

Any national groups doing good things on this?

- Well, I think there were, we had about 40 ish seats in our tossup category, 35 to 40 seats in the tossup category.

And then another tranche, let's call it another 20 seats or so in a category that we said was leaning more toward one can or the other, which are competitive, they're just not like the most, most competitive.

So you're right.

The theory would be that we have 435 seats.

We could certainly, can't we at least have 100 seats that are considered competitive.

And some of this is a reality of our partisanship and our polarization.

That regardless of what happens and what the way the district lines are drawn, right, we talk a lot about gerrymandering which is an important piece of this, but another important piece of this is that voters are really so locked in to their partisanship.

And I'm not saying that they're like excited so excited about being a Republican or a Democrat that they are identifying more strongly with the party.

I think what they're doing is they're identifying themselves as part of this team.

And they certainly see the other team as either the enemy, or the opposition, or whatever category you wanna put or name you wanna give that.

And so, theoretically, you could have more competitive districts if more people were willing to say, you know what, look, I would never vote for a Republican but this person seems really nice.

Or I'd never vote for a Democrat, but you know, they're doing a really, really good job.

Giving the other party the benefit of the doubt.

We used to have, when I first started, at least 100 districts in the house where you had a candidate, or the, I'm sorry, the incumbent in that house district was in a district that the other presidential nominee carried, right.

So you'd have a democratic congressperson in a district won by the Republican presidential nominee and vice versa.

So close to 100 of those.

That number has steadily declined over the years.

We're now to about 16 of those after the 2020 election.

Now you can say, okay, well, that's redistricting's fault and it's gerrymandering's fault.

Or you can say, but what was it that, you know, you didn't gerrymandering North Dakota or South Dakota, right.

They have one congressional seat.

Not a lot of people.

But it wasn't that long ago, North Dakota had two democratic senators and two democratic senators, South Dakota, and a representative from Congress that were both Democrats.

We're not voting for Democrats anymore, right.

And here we had really competitive races in New Hampshire, in Connecticut and Rhode Island where it looked like maybe.

for the first time in a long time, Republicans were gonna be able to kind of make some inroads back into places.

These were all districts, by the way, that Republicans used to hold.

And they fell short in every single one of those seats.

So this is as much about the inability of our electorate to see the opportunity for voting for the other party as much as it is about, you know, what does it say about our process.

Well, it says that it's not just the line drawers fault, right.

A lot of this resides in this idea of what kind of, what does it say about you if you are going to open yourself up to voting for a different party.

Which wasn't such a crazy idea that long ago.

- I got the signal that we have time for one more question.

- All right.

- So I'm gonna ask a question that two of you wanna know, and I have a feeling more, just didn't write it down.

I'll read this one.

Do you have inside info on who will replace Judy Woodruff as anchor of "NewsHour?"

- Oh my gosh, no.

She's irreplaceable.

- That's what the other person said.

- She's totally irreplaceable.

- As though anyone could do that.

- As though anyone could, she's amazing.

And everybody there is amazing.

I really, I feel so honored to be able to go in and work with all of them.

It's an incredible group of people who are so dedicated to what they do.

And she has been the leader and just fearless in what she does for so long that it is, I still haven't really let myself process what it's gonna be like to not see her sitting across the desk.

But because of the talent that has been recruited there and let's face it, it's not as glamorous as being at a network or being at a cable station, but you get to do the work and in a way that you can't do anywhere else.

And so you have, you know, younger newer generations coming in and living up to that standard that has been set at the "NewsHour" for so many years.

And I think Judy set it at a very high level too.

And so I'll leave it at that.

- You don't know?

(audience laughing softly) - No and I'm just, you know, it's not my pay grade, whatever, below my, above my pay grade.

- Amy Walter, it has been such a pleasure to have you here in Portland, Maine.

- Thank you.

(audience clapping loudly) - Come back.

- Thank you, it's been great.

Thank you.

(audience clapping loudly) (inspirational orchestra music)