The Axe Files with David Axelrod

And now from the Institute of Politics at the University of Chicago and CNN Audio, The Axe Files, with your host, David Axelrod.

On election night, John King, one of America's most seasoned and insightful political reporters, will be at his post the Magic Wall at CNN, where he'll slice and dice voting returns like no one else can. John dropped by the IOP this week on his yearlong journeys around the country, talking to the battleground state voters who will determine the outcome of this fateful election. So given that we're just a few weeks away, I wanted to sit down with him to see what he's learned. Here's our conversation. John King, it is always, always good to see you, my friend, and to to get you in the midst of your travels.

It's great to be here, actually, in the house where all the magic happens.

Here at the Institute of Politics. Yes. First, before we talk about where we are in this election and what you've learned, I want to talk about how you how you came to the decision to do this. And I think maybe we covered this the last time I talked to you when you were just setting out. I'm not sure. But just to review, you spent a lot of years as a Associated Press reporter covering politics, went into broadcast journalism, got dragooned into being an anchor and spent many years behind a desk covering these elections and next to a big Magic Wall. And then this year, you decided you wanted to hit the road and actually talk to real people instead of reading polls. How's that worked out for you?

Breathtaking. It has been the experience of a lifetime. I knew it would be amazing and I was so wrong. It's amazing times amazing. Exponentially breathtaking. It has rewired my brain in many ways. We've talked about this many times over the last many years, that Washington is almost always wrong or always off. New York, too, where a lot of decisions are made about big, you know, big money is. I wanted to get back on the road because that was my beginning. This is my 10th presidential campaign. So it's sort of this nostalgic Back to the Future thing. That was the idea for me. I was dragooned, dragooned is a little strong of a word, you know. But but but I do think you realize as you get older, sometimes you think, you know, that's the next job I have to get, right. Every profession has like a pyramid and you want to get to the top of the pyramid because you think, you know, I'm as good as everybody else or I'm better than that person. I can do this. I love being an anchor. You know, the State of the Union, our Sunday show, I started that show when Obama was president. Inside Politics, I brought that name back to CNN. I'm incredibly proud to have done that because that was the show I first started on when I switched to television. But I just realized that, you know, I was in this town that in 2016 and then also to a degree in 2020, a lesser degree, I was off about some things. And, you know, my family in Boston still a very blue collar family. You know, they give it to me in texts and conversations back and forth. And when I did travel a little bit, I was like, you know what? I want to do this again. And I actually had asked to do it in 2020, and they asked me to keep the show. So I came back in 2023 and I said, I need to do this. I just I don't want to sit at the desk again. And I have learned so much. I have learned so much. And the biggest headline is that I'm, in my experience, almost 40 years of doing this, I believe that Washington has never been more disconnected from the people it governs. And some of that's anger. Some of it the people, they're past their anger, David, they're just passed it. So they can't get mad anymore. They're frustrated. It's disillusionment, it's disaffection. It's dismay. Sometimes it's disgust. And you find this from the most Trumpy Republicans to the Bernie Sanders Democrats who just look at Washington and say, it's not about me, it's not relevant to me. They're not doing anything about me.

Listen, we sensed that in 2008. I remember Obama going out there and saying, you know, this is all about who's up and who's down and who's winning and who's losing. It's never about solving problems. It's never about what's actually going on in people's lives. And I think that's what voters thought then, and I think that's what they think now.

'And I think that's one of the things they're missing now. It's not my job to take sides, but one of the things that then-Senator and ultimately President Obama did very well was he was an aspirational figure, but he gave them a North Star. It was hope. It was different. It was we're going to do things. We're going to come together. Now, again, people listening, some agree with everything he did. Some agree with nothing he did. I leave that up to them. But in terms of the campaign, in terms of rallying a country when it's in a funk, when it has lost trust in its institutions, you have to give them a North Star. You have to feel like you're going somewhere together. And that way, when there are mistakes along the way or bumps in the road, you're part of something. So it's your team. So you stay with it even when you're even when it gets a little bumpy. I think that's one of the things that's missing now. I would argue the polarization is even worse.

You know, there's a reason for that. I mean, social media was in its infancy when we started. It's now a dominant force in our politics and the whole business model of social media. It relies on keeping people on on their sites to buy stuff. And their great insight is that the way you do that is through alienation, outrage and politics has come to mirror that to a large degree. So you have these tremendous tailwinds behind division. And it's, you know, and of course, those tailwinds sweep a guy like Trump along.

'You used to be able to get a break from it. But now you can't. You're right. If you go back to the pre, you know, I started this pre-Internet. I remember meeting at the AP with really brilliant people saying, you know, this Internet thing is starting to take hold and it's probably going to have a, you know, a minor niche impact on our business. They were smart people. They just, you know, nobody understood what was about to happen. And we still don't understand what's happening. But yeah, the smart phones that I say make us stupid. They also it's easy for them to make us angry.

One of the challenges of where we are today as a country, as a world, is that technology, it churns at exponential rates. So AI's coming on board. These things are happening at such a fast pace that we can't get our arms around the societal impacts of all of it, and it's creating a lot of anxiety.

You just said much more clearly what I meant about the North Star. And that when you travel, people are out there and they're just like, Whoa, where's all this going? What is this AI stuff? What am I supposed tell my kids to learn in college if they even go to college? They're are no fact, that factory that used to be here for Granddad and Dad and me, it's not here for my kid. Pick your poison in this globalization technological revolution. AI, foreign actors, some good, some bad. There's so many things happening at once that everyone feels like they're in a churn. And they also had Covid, and they had the cost of living thing hit them in the head in this uncertain time. They want somebody to point to the North Star and say it's going to be bumpy, but that's where we're going.

Yeah, and that's honestly, I'm not sure anybody is doing that right now. But, you know, one of the other consequences of all this is that democracies, our democracy certainly is set up in such a way that, and all democracies are, when you're divided, you move slowly, right? Because there are, there are checks on each other. So you've got these forces that are dividing us and creating all this anxiety in people. And then you have a government that seems stuck in the mud even when it's not. It feels that way to people that government isn't up to the task of responding to their challenges. And that's, you know, for a demagogue, that is a very fertile environment because there's a certain simplicity to a guy who comes along and says, I'll take care of it. I'll stop that war in a day. We'll have a health care plan that's better than the one you have. And stand by. I'm still. Well, we're working on it, we'll get it done. I mean, people are looking for simple answers or at least some sense of solidity. And the truth is, is harder and more nuanced, you know, about what we need to do.

'And think about even that, the decline of, we don't have a principled conservative party in America anymore. That was the Republican Party. But you went through this. You've passed the Affordable Care Act and in the next election, because it hasn't been implemented yet, the Republicans were able to say be afraid. They're going to change everything. They're going to ruin your lives, going to make it cost more. They're going to take away what you need. They're going to take away what you love. You won't be to see your doctor, you know, two elections later, it's implemented. And since then, it's been a great thing for the Democrats because it has actually lowered people's costs. You keep your kids until 26, pre-existing conditions.

No just Democrats, but people.

Everybody and so on and so forth. So, you know.

But politically, Democrats.

Don't hear that issue anymore, right?

No. Well, you did you did briefly at the beginning of this campaign. I mean, Trump said, yes, we're going to do away with it again. And he almost got shoved into the back of a car and driven off by the other Republicans.

But think about the idea that, you know, the Democrats paid such a political price just for the theory of what would happen when Obamacare, the Affordable Care Act, was implemented. And Trump says something like, well, I have a concept. And there's no punishment for that. You know, when it was a concept, when Obamacare was a piece of paper that hadn't been implemented yet, there was huge political fallout. But now, a few elections later, everyone says, actually this is working pretty well. Everything needs to be fixed, everything needs to be changed. But the fact that you could say something like that after having been president for four years and you can't give any details about what you're going to do about an issue that became quicksand temporarily once it was done, so personal to people, that to me is like, what? So he can say and do. That, you know, again, not taking partisan sides, it's like in all my years covering this, that you could say something like that on such a huge issue and your supporters just shrug and say, okay, that's new. That is I can't use the word cult. That's not the thing I do. But there's a loyalty to him that has nothing to do with policy.

Yeah. On when Vance said in the debate that, you know, Trump had saved the Affordable Care Act, I mean, it was a laughable thing because he tried 60 times to repeal it. And, you know, the thing that was underreported after that was in many different ways he tried to strangle it when he couldn't repeal it, you know, by cutting the marketing budget for it. So people didn't know when to enroll in it by cutting subsidies for it. And I expect you'll see some of that again, not because he necessarily knows, understands or has strong feelings about the policy itself, but because it has the name Obamacare on it.

It's not his.

Not his. Not his. I was looking at the Real Clear Politics averages. They may not be the best averages, but they're not off by huge amounts. And they have Trump leading Pennsylvania by a 10th of a point, leading Michigan by 9/10 of a point, leading Georgia by 5/10 of a point. Harris leading Wisconsin by 3/10 of a point. North Carolina, trump leading by 5/10 of a point. Arizona, trump leading by a point and Nevada by 2/10 of a point. Given the margin of error of polls, I mean, that could be a point or two one way, a point or two another way. But. This damn close.

Incredibly close. Real Clear Politics includes some partisan polls conducted by Republicans. And so if you look at last year elections, they tend to be a little bit more Republican in their averages than, say, The New York Times or when CNN does their averages. So you'll see other averages that show the vice president doing a little better than that.

Yes, in some of these states.

But it's the same thing. If she's ahead, you know, you said Trump was, what, plus one or plus a little more almost in Pennsylvania. You might see one that shows her plus one. That means it's a tie.

Well, I heard about two polls today from Pennsylvania, from very reputable pollsters whose methodology you would trust. One had her winning by two points. The other had Trump winning by two points. But it does feel like, you know, she had an incredible ride from the time that she leaped out as a candidate in August. And I likened it because it was during the Olympics then that she got a tremendous jump off the dive and she was gliding in. They had a great convention. She had a really a superior debate that I think not only boosted her because she commanded the stage, but it also wounded Trump, which is why you'll not see him on a debate stage again. But about ten days after that debate, she was rising, rising, rising because social media reverberates for some time after her debate. Ten days after the debate, that momentum stopped and maybe receded a little, which is creating enormous anxiety among Democrats who spent every election year on the psychiatrist couch anyway. Do you sense that out there? Do you sense a momentum or at least a momentum stop?

Plateau or a flatline? Yes, absolutely. So you take all the data you see. And one of the things I love about my work, and I always convince myself, remember, John, when you interview these six voters here, ten voters there.

They may not be representative.

It's anecdotal, Right. But the charm of it is we've been in touch with them now, most of them for more than a year.

And how many, just just give us a sense how many voters around the country.

Were at 85 plus or 85 plus in ten states, including the six, you know, six. We didn't start in North Carolina. The only thing I regret is we didn't start a group in North Carolina because we were trying to stay lean and mean. And I wish I had one in North Carolina. But in all the other battleground states, we have groups, and they're Black voters and they're Haley voters and they're union voters and they're young voters. And we keep going back to them. And, you know, so you have to understand that it's anecdotal, but when you build a relationship with them, they're on television. I started myself, I'm following trying to follow your lead into this podcast space, and we've done a few podcasts as well, but we're also asking them to be our reporters. So when we're in touch with them in between television pieces, it's not just, what do you think, David? It's like, what are you hearing? What are you hearing? And they bring us new people and sometimes that reach out to those people and maybe they end up in a piece, maybe they don't. But so through those 85, and they're, think of it like friends and family. They've become my eyes and ears. And so they just tell you so much about their family. There's a woman who's in our.

It's so great.

Latest podcast in Georgia. She's a, you know, the daughter of Vietnamese immigrants. And she's she was a Covid nurse and she was exhausted by that. So she started a little Boba tea shop. She wanted a break in her life. She's a small businesswoman. She's a high intensity, goes on the website, who's got the best small business plan? Her parents are more conservative. They think Trump is better for business. So you learn from people about the debates they're having in their community with the business next door. You met me when I was an old AP guy. I like being a shoe leather reporter. It is that close and you feel it when you're out there. And the people who have not yet decided or are not happy is what I call them. Everybody, almost every voter has leanings. And so you'll talk to people who are, I'm a Republican. I don't want to vote for Trump, and I would probably vote for Trump today because I don't understand her, I don't know her.

Talk a little bit about why they say they don't want to vote for Trump.

'Well, a lot of Republicans say they don't vote for Trump because they're Reagan-Bush conservatives. I have one in Berks County, Pennsylvania, who initially said she was going to write in a conservative, and then she watched Trump at the debate throw Zelensky under the bus. And she said, I'm voting for Kamala Harris. I'll come back to the Republican Party when they stand for democracy. She was going to write in John Bolton or some conservative or Liz Cheney or some conservative. But she was just doing the math in her head in battleground Pennsylvania and says, well, that might actually help Trump. So I don't want him to win. I will do anything I can to not let him win, because that's not my party. She left. She was a, she joined the Republican Party when she was 18 years old. You know, she's about my age now. And she just, she voted for Nikki Haley in the primary. And then the next week, she switched to an independent. She wants the Republican Party back and she says she will come back the minute they have an actual principled conservative who stands for her values. Same, similar voters. The woman, Zoila Sanchez, out, real estate agent out in Vegas. She's still a registered Republican, but she voted for your guy, Barack Obama, in 2008. She wanted to make history. She liked the aspiration. She liked the North Star. She left her party because she saw something she liked. And she stayed Democrat for president since then. And what she says is, you know, she said maybe I could vote for Romney, but I was, I had voted for Obama and I liked Obama, you know, so Romney was okay with her. He was he was a conservative, but she was an Obama voter then. So she stuck with him, but.

Is she voting Republican in othr races?

'Yes, yes, yes, they have a Republican governor out there, actually helps Trump in Nevada, the Republican governor out there is reasonably popular and reasonably popular in the Latino community. That actually helps Trump because they have a Republican say, okay, that's okay. That's the one place we talk about this in a different context. That's--we live in nationalized elections now because of the social media age, because of the cable television age, because of the fracturing of the media. Everything moves, you can see it all at once instantaneously. I would say Nevada is the one outlier in that in the sense that it got to 31% unemployment in Covid. Twice the national average. So it's kind of it's own, that is a unique state. Some days you used to say, I gotta talk about coal in West Virginia. I got to talk about farming in Iowa. Those days are mostly gone. You have to address the local issues. But we move in national waves now. Nevada's a little differently.

Because there the casinos had to close, and they are such a big employer.

'And so in that state, you do see sometimes Trump outside of the margin. All the other battleground states are right around the, you know, within the margin of error and close. But but the breathtaking part of this, I'm rambling a little bit about it because I get excited about this, is when you when you talk to people who you know, this woman, Christine Nguyen who runs the boba shop, trauma nurse, thought Trump and Biden were both too old, didn't vote in 2020 because she had no connection to either one of them. And then she felt bad about that. So when I first met her, it was Biden and Trump. She was going to vote, but she was very discouraged about it that she probably would have voted for Biden because the climate matters to her. Reproductive rights matter to her. Her small business had her back then thinking, well, maybe I'll look at Trump if he's really more pro-business. Now, she has, you walk into her shop, the first thing you see when you walk in the door on the right on the shelf is a whole bunch of knickknacks and they sell some merch. And she set like a third of the shelf aside for a Kamala Harris leaflets. So when people come in, they can pick them up right there. And she said, I guess she's the daughter of immigrants. And she said, I see myself, I see myself, I can see myself in this candidate. And and then she said that she actually talks about climate change. Thank you very much. Young people have been screaming for somebody to do that. But that's the connection. I mean, you had this the Obama campaign, which allowed you to, you know, flip Indiana, to flip North Carolina. A lot of that through record African-American turnout. But people who said I have a connection here, I'm going to invest here, You do hear a lot of it. I know it's an old cliche, lesser of two evils or I don't like any of them. What we were saying about Biden, Trump, the double haters at the beginning, that they were going to decide the election. Now we do meet people. A lot of people. This is this is my paradox about Harris, right? She has flatlined. But when you travel, you also find a ton of excitement, way more excitement than we found for Biden. So are those people knocking on doors? Are those people going to make sure that you know, their spouse, their partner, their brother, their sister? You know, are they going to drag them along? So that's what makes the matter so complicated because, yes, she has flatlined in some degrees and there are little complications in different states. I think they're responsible for that, plus some big events that are responsible for that. But you do see excitement that was nonexistent when Biden was the candidate.

We're going to take a short break and we'll be right back with more of The Axe Files. And now back to the show. You know, you hear some people say, well, because this is what happens when everybody gets tight sphincters at this part of the campaign. Well, some of the old Biden people say, well, you know, maybe we would have been better. No, I mean, that race, Trump was on a course for an electoral landslide, in my view. She introduced an element of excitement to this race. People were so thirsty, hungry for another alternative. To me, the question is, I said to you earlier that she proved herself to be a great first, second, third date. Now they're considering marriage and they're asking deeper questions. And the question is, is she satisfying people? She's hitting the economic agenda that I think is important to people in their lives on several issues. I think this home health care thing she did was really, really important because there are a lot of people in that sandwich generation, and you get into those Midwestern industrial states, you see that a lot. But sometimes on some issues, on you get into abortion rights and she is passionate and she is utterly credible and authentic. You get into some of these other issues and she's saying the right words, but it sounds like you learn them at Berlitz. Sometimes it's not, it doesn't come as naturally because even though she has this middle class background, you know, her father was an economist. Her mother was ultimately a cancer researcher. And she's from a metropolitan area and from California. And the question is, is she does she need to authenticate herself more for the people you're talking to in Pennsylvania, in in Michigan and in Wisconsin?

Yeah, I think you said it just right. Is it she's reading from the playbook or is it her playbook? Are these her issues, does she feel them with passion? And on reproductive rights, she clearly does. Social justice, she clearly does. It's an excellent point in the sense that is it her. You know Trump wants to close the border. You know who Trump is, right? You know Trump when he lies about Springfield, Ohio, or he lies about Aurora, Colorado. He knows he's lying. The immigrants have not taken over those cities and they're not illegal, by the way. He knows what he's doing. So, you know.

They see it as a tactic.

It's. Well, Trump does. Sure.

No, he does. But to the voters you talk to, does it disturb them that he's.

It disturbs some of the, you know, a traditional Reagan Bush or Nikki Haley Republican, Mitt Romney Republican. It disturbs them because they believe in public service. You can agree or disagree with them. They believe in public service. Back to the connection point. I think that's the part that has been hard for Harris to break through, to make a connection. Now, she became the nominee in July. That's that's incredibly hard. She only got one debate, which is why she wanted a second one. But I do think that personally, you know, no one ever knows their vice president, no matter who their vice president is. You don't think of them as a president. And then all of a sudden they're running as the candidate. Joe Biden did it in the middle of a crisis. George H.W. Bush did, the last, the only times in modern history it's happened, the vice president's done it. They ran a really nasty campaign, even though George H.W. Bush is a really nice guy. They ran a really nasty campaign.

Remember, he was 17 points behind after the Democratic convention against Michael Dukakis. And in six weeks, Roger Ailes engineered a negative campaign that basically took that race away from Dukakis, and partly because Dukakis was inept in responding, partly because in debate he gave an answer that was really revealing.

Impersonal.

Impersonal. Yeah. There are young people in this room here who are listening to us have this conversation. The question was, he was opposed to the death penalty, mike Dukakis. And and Bernard Shaw, then of CNN, said if Kitty Dukakis were raped and murdered, would you support the death penalty for her killer? And Dukakis said very calmly, Well, no, I wouldn't, Bernie, because, as you know, I'm opposed to the death penalty.

You might have been able to get away with a no, but he showed no passion. He showed no fight. He showed no you know, no, I would snap that guy's neck, Bernie, but I wouldn't, you know.

But that but there's a bigger question here.

I think. You know, so you're right. You raise this excellent point and you know this better than I do. You've run campaigns and you've run campaigns that have been behind and won. You've won campaigns. You occasionally you lose. Right. Is that, one of the things, I think her performance has surprised so many people. As someone who covered her primary campaign back in 2000, she was a horrible candidate. You know, we've talked about.

2020.

Right. So we've talked before about how.

Actually 2019. She never made it to 2020.

Right out of the gate, you know, Barack Obama wasn't as good a candidate as he up being.

Took him five months.

Right. And so and so she doesn't have five months, which is part of the challenge here on the big stage like this. But I also think, you know, if you talk to Bill Clinton and I didn't talk as much to Barack Obama about this, but, you know, Bill Clinton would tell you the best thing that ever happened to him was losing reelection to Frank White, running a competitive election.

For governor.

In Arkansas way back in the day. You know, Barack Obama lost to Bobby Rush when he.

By 30 points.

Yeah.. But losing changes you. Losing. If you're a competitive person, losing, forgive my language, sucks. And you think if you want to stay in the game, I have to learn the lesson. What did I do wrong? Or what did he do better or she do better? And Harris, it's not her fault. But she does not come from a competitive political environment. So she has not had this knockdown, drag out, adapt along the way races.

There's another thing here, John, which is she also doesn't come from a state where I mean, I've said this before, I don't know if I've said it here, but Bob Shrum in the day said a political rally in California is five people around a television set. And you don't really interact with people very much. It's too vast a state and it's not as politically diverse a state. I mean, Illinois is now a solidly blue state. But Barack Obama spent a lot of time in downstate Illinois talking to people who are wholly different and eight years in the legislature working with people from around the state. And when he got to Iowa, it was familiar to him. But you know, Bill Clinton, all that time he spent in Arkansas made it so much easier for him to travel this big, diverse country and relate to it. And you have to. There are two guys who may go down in this election because of the partisan ization of presidential years. But Jon Tester and Sherrod Brown. Tester in Montana. Brown in Ohio. The only reason that they have a ghost of a chance, and I think Tester less so than Brown, though I, you know, we'll see what happens, is that they have spent their lives working in states where they have to talk to people every day who don't share their points of view, who are neighbors. And they learn how to have that dialogue, how to listen and how to respond and.

How to respect.

And.

Respect is missing. Respect is missing from our politics because people have stopped talking to the other side.

'Exactly. And, you know, for the Democratic Party, what that's translated into is as the Democratic Party has become a more a more college educated metropolitan party, still the party of working people, that's the self-image of the Democratic Party, that's the agenda of the Democratic Party. But Democrats too often approach people in small towns and rural areas like missionaries or anthropologists and like, we're here to help you become more like us.

Even some, add union halls to that. To the degree I mean, I was just in Michigan and like Debbie Dingell comes home all the time and she goes.

Congresswoman from.

Congresswoman from Michigan, just outside the Detroit area. Now, her district's been pushed a little bit outside of the city. But she also has Washtenaw County, where the University of Michigan has young voters mad about Israel Palestine. But she comes home and she goes in the room. She lets people yell at her. Right. And she'll go in a union hall and a bunch of them would be like, Debbie, I like you, Debbie, I like you. And then a guy will say, Debbie, I like you, but I'm voting for Trump. Debbie I'm voting for Trump and I'll probably vote for you, but I'm mad at you about this. And she stands there and she takes it. Those people leave that room saying she's tough. You know, she respected me. She listened to me. That makes a world of difference. She's one of the people, Democrats around Philadelphia, the same thing, who are begging the Harris campaign. Walk union halls. Walk a factory line. Get on the factory floor, please go. And yeah, some people are going to say some things. Okay. You want the nuclear code? Go get yelled at.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Well, you know, one of the races, one of the key races there in Michigan is for the Senate. And Elissa Slotkin has represented a swing district in Michigan. She's comes out of national security realm, spent time in Iraq, tough as nails. And she has no compunction about walking into any environment there and having a conversation and, you know, and mixing it up and listening. And if she survives there and I, I would bet that she will, if she survives there, it's going to be because of that. And they would do well to listen to people like her and Debbie Dingell.

I can tell you from this project, I have learned so much listening. You know, my mother used to always say, you know, you only learn when you're listening. I was one of seven kids. I think it was really her way of telling us to shut up. But I took it to heart that you only learn when you're listening. The other point quickly, on the Senate races you mentioned. You know, Tester's running in Montana. Trump's going to win by 15 or 20 points or more. That's the really hard one. The one benefit of Harris. We don't know how the presidential race is going to turn out. But because the Democratic base is much more energized now, both in House races and in some of these Senate races, Pennsylvania, Ohio, elsewhere, the Democratic candidates are in a better place because they do have an active base. You're right. Bob Casey has his own brand, Sherrod Brown has his own brand.

In Pennsylvania.

In Pennsylvania. These guys, you know, these guys, in a tough climate, you know, have a personal brand that they hope would get them through it. But if the base collapses, that's when you have your surprises. Guys who you thought were going to be competitive get wiped out. The one benefit of the switch, whether Harris wins or loses the presidency, is it has improved the Democratic prospects at the House and the Senate and then down ballot. Whereas if you had a conversation, you know, a week after the Biden Trump debate and you were talking to Democrats running for sheriff or dogcatcher or legislature or Congress there, it was a full scale panic.

You know, everybody knows you not just from your travels, but from your tutorials, really, at the board, at the magic board. Talk about these seven states, but the ones you've traveled particularly, I think most people think Pennsylvania is the tipping point state. And if you talk to the Trump campaign, they'd say, we've got to win Georgia and Pennsylvania and the race is over. From an electoral standpoint, that's right.

Right, they assume in that math they're also winning North Carolina. And so then they get, then they get Georgia in Pennsylvania.

That's true. I'm talking about states that Biden won. He didn't win North Carolina.

If you look at the map, you see me at the magic wall, as we call it, and you see those seven states in yellow. They're the toss up states, you know. They go from Arizona, Nevada to Georgia to North Carolina and then you're swinging through, you know, the blue wall states, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin. So they're very different. But they have one thing in common that is now even bigger than the gender gap in American politics. If you look at the median, the national average of four year college, did you go to four year college? Did you not go to four year college? All these battleground states hug that line. They're either just above or just below it right at the national median. And so education is now the big dividing line, biggest dividing line in American politics. If you're four years of high school and that's it, you are more likely to vote Republican. If you have four years of college, you're more likely to vote Democrat.

If you're white. Although increasingly class is a function.

That there.

Is a is an overriding factor.

The Trump rise among Latino men and Black men is heavily concentrated among working class Latino and Black men who most likely have a high school degree or maybe a year of some technical training or something. But they don't have four years of college. So that's the biggest dividing line. It's dangerous to overgeneralize anything, but that's where you start if you're looking at these competitive states. And then you look at what's happening within. So what's what's changing in these states? People from rural areas, because they need jobs, are moving closer to the exurbs or the suburbs or the cities. And so when they move there, they're still Republicans. Maybe. But over time, things can change. You're surrounded by people. Your life changes, your needs change. You know what you get from the schools change. So that's the shift that's happening.

Interesting because it actually, geographically, the exurbs are still are still fertile ground for Republicans. As you move closer to the city, it becomes more difficult.

'I mean, when I go now, when you mentioned Dukakis, so my first campaign, that was my first race. And of course, that was my first convention was in Atlanta in 1980. It was the Democratic convention. I was standing on stage because I was the AP pool reporter. And Dukakis was a little more away than you are, you know, five, six, eight feet away, giving his speech. One of my first memories of national politics was being in Atlanta. And I remember being there for the week. You'd wander around a little bit in those days. You know, Fulton County is Atlanta. Clayton County is just below it. DeKalb County is just to the east. Those are, even then 36 years ago, heavily, they're more now, but heavily diverse. A lot of African-Americans, more blue leaning. But Gwinnett and Cobb, but that's where Newt Gingrich came from, right? That was the those outer those outer suburbs, those were Republican. They're all Democratic counties now. And this is the key test. If you want to put one test for 2024, Donald Trump is going to turn out his base. His heavy focus on immigration is to gin up his base. It's also to try to get a little bit more in the suburbs, at least to push people away from her in the suburbs. He barely won the suburbs in 2016. He got smoked, the reason Nancy Pelosi was speaker after the midterms was the suburban revolt against Donald Trump. And then Joe Biden won the presidency because he turned out the Democratic base in urban areas and overwhelmingly won the suburbs. If this is now an election on the margins, we talked about how narrow those polls were, right. Is Harris losing a little bit here, a little bit there? If Trump can improve his number just a tiny bit in the suburbs, that tis Georgia back your way. That tips Arizona back your way. Nevada, like Clark County, Vegas. It's not just Vegas anymore. It's the suburbs around it.

Let me interrupt you to ask you one question on this. Last week, the Georgia Supreme Court upheld the six week abortion ban in Georgia. Brings that back into the center of discussion. There is an abortion initiative on the ballot in Arizona. There is an abortion initiative or abortion rights initiative on the ballot in Nevada. Do you think these are going to make a difference in terms of turnout in those suburban areas and turnout among younger voters?

You raise you raise what I think is one of the most interesting and fascinating questions of this cycle and that is ticket splitting. We not only apply ticket splitting to candidates. Right. You know, Ronald Reagan's running for president, but you're going to vote for Ronald Reagan and Ted Kennedy. You're going to vote for Ronald Reagan and say Paul Simon here in Illinois or something like that. If you know, if you're a Reagan Democrat. That's almost nonexistent. The only time that happened to 2020 was Susan Collins of Maine. The Republican senator gets reelected in a state that Joe Biden wins. The only one. That used to be.

You know, I managed Paul Simon's campaign and we, Reagan was carrying the state by 500,000 votes and we won by 88,000 votes. You don't see spreads like that anymore.

No. No, you don't. And so, again, that goes back to personal brands, but also goes back to the nationalization of our politics. And so ticket splitting is a lost art. That's ticket splitting of a different sort. You have a Senate race in Arizona. You mentioned Arizona. So you have the Kari Lake, Ruben Gallego Senate race. Kari Lake, the Republican who still thinks she's governor. She you know, she hasn't conceded the last race she ran that she lost quite convincingly.

It's a fall back in case the Senate thing doesn't work out for her.

'I digress. But so there, are Republicans going to vote? We know from all these states that have had these statewide abortion initiatives that a lot of Republicans are voting for abortion rights. A lot of those Republicans actually don't personally think of themselves as pro-life, but they don't want judges and politicians making these decisions. They think they just it's gone way too far. And so they're more libertarian. You know, maybe they support the states. Right. There's a different difference of opinion. But but so are you going to have Republicans turn out and vote to protect abortion rights on the state, you know, in the state constitution, but then vote for Donald Trump? Great question. We'll learn this from the exit polls. The Harris campaign is certainly hoping that's not the case, that even if you were leaning Trump, when you see that, you know, when you get closer, when you actually reviewing the ballot, when you're actually zoned in, that you can switch them. You know that in the close of this campaign, Harris is going to come back to that issue. Again, the short time frame has left them in a constant debate about what are we emphasizing today. Now, you can do ads on a whole bunch of different issues, but if you really want to have an impact, you know, you want to kind of be under this under the same umbrella. And cost of living is her biggest problem. Cost of living. You've mentioned my work on the magic wall. There are 3143 counties in the United States of America. In five of them, five of them, only five of them have wages outpaced inflation in the last eight years. Think about that. So in in almost every county in America. If you take in, you know, food, housing, energy and other costs, those those costs have outpaced what you're getting paid for a good stretch now. Throughout the Biden years. Yes, the statistics say it's getting better. This is her problem. You know, the statistics say it's getting better. People's legs are tired. They've been running in a headwind or swimming against the tide for years. And so maybe the tides, maybe the, maybe making a little progress right now. But they're tired and they want to blame somebody. That's just human nature.

Can I say something about this, too? This this last bout, this siege of inflation comes on top of decades in which the economy has changed. And a lot of these people live in communities where they've seen the economy change and they've seen people herald all the prosperity, but the prosperity is somewhere else. It's not in their communities. And so, you know, I think in some ways it's been a mistake or a missed opportunity for the Harris campaign to not talk about a broader thing, which is for for decades, we've seen a slow kind of tilting of the playing field against a lot of these communities, against working class people. And so the project is not just to deal with inflation, it's to deal with an economy that is in some ways rigged against the chances of everyday people.

I agree 100%, 1,000% from what you hear from people. And I think the challenge with, you know, again, we talk about a lot of little things and in a race that's going to be decided on the margins, maybe, again, 100,000 votes in 3 or 4 states, right? 100,000 votes split, maybe fewer than that, maybe 75,000 votes, split between 3 or 4 states are going to decide who's the president of the United States. So you're always thinking if you're the tactician and you ran two of these things, you know, can I move? You know, can I move some votes in this suburb? Can I move some votes with this constituency? What do I have to do, you know, to get that, you know, Haylee voter, you're thinking like that. I would also argue, you know, what about or can you blow all that out with a big picture? Right. Hope and change was big. Putting people first, Bill Clinton, you know, in a tough environment, I'm on your side. I mentioned the North Star earlier. You mentioned all this stress. I would add into that the Covid stress. But you're right, people have an economic. People have said the country's on the wrong track for years now. Even when the economy's been booming, people have said we're on the wrong track. People are exhausted from Covid and then they've got the headwinds of all this cost of living. I think inflation oversimplifies it. A cost of living thing. Can't buy a new car. Got to keep the old going a little bit longer. Can't take a vacation. For some families, I mean, for my family growing up, you know, twice a year Dad would throw us in the station wagon to go to McDonald's. That was a huge deal. I mean, we cried. I mean, that was huge. We had no money. That was like a huge deal. When you meet families and you see the parents who are like, I can't do that. I can't do things. I haven't take my kids anywhere, I'm dipping into the savings. I got to be careful with the credit cards. And they're worried. How far behind is my kid because of Covid at schools. You see this, and people process in different ways, but you just see it and they're whether they're voting for Trump or they're voting for Harris, they're amazing human beings.

We're going to take a short break and we'll be right back with more of The Axe Files. And now back to the show. It reminds me of a story. This goes back to 2001. Remember, there was a recession then too. I had just bought a place in Michigan and it was two years renovating this whole barn. And the first night one of the new appliances malfunctioned and the barn caught on fire. It was all, it was 150 year old barn. It was. And we stood outside in the snow thinking that our dream was about to burn down. And it was New Year's Eve and the volunteer fire department showed up. And these guys were valiant. And they came in and they saved our house. And we went by the next day to bring them some stuff and thank them. And I said, So you guys, you just volunteer to jump into these burning buildings and stuff? And the guy said, No, I mean, we do it because we like to, but we also, you know, we get I forget what he said, eight bucks an hour to do it. And that gives us I can take the family out for dinner. And I'll never forget the conversation because that's a reality for most of you know, many, many people in this country.

And a lot of people in New York and Washington don't get it. They just don't get it. I mean, you know, I, I remember where I came from. I'm very fortunate now, you know.

We should remind people that your dad was a guard in the jail.

My dad was a jail guard. My mom stayed at home with seven kids, then went back to work when he had a health serious health issue. But I live a nice, comfortable life now. But that's that's why you asked me at the beginning, why did I want to get out of Washington? Because, you know, you can get that Beltway fever, too. And so I just wanted to get out there and, you know, and see it and feel it and touch it. And they're amazing people. And I bet you didn't ask any of those volunteer firefighters whether Democrats or Republicans. That America is still alive out there.

And nor did they ask me.

Right. That America, that America is still out there. The thing that frustrates me, I'm more frustrated now when I come back to Washington in the sense that if you put ten Trump voters and ten Harris voters in a room and said, write an immigration plan, write a tax plan, what do you want to do about this Covid deficit in our schools? How do we surge resources and help these kids? They wouldn't solve everything, but unlike Washington, they would solve three parts of it or four parts of it or six parts of it. And they would say, all right, let's do this and we'll come back tomorrow, as opposed to no, no, no, we can't raise money off that, right?

No. And I think people you know, people don't get credit for understanding this element of politics. They understand that too many, many politicians, in Washington in particular, but not limited to it, they too often view issues as something to weaponize in order to fuel their political ambitions. And, than real issues in people's lives to be to be grappled with. That isn't by any means everybody. And there are a lot of, I think in some ways we shortchanged the good people who are there trying to get stuff done. But the current is very, very strong. And that, I think the level of cynicism about our politics is, is is is not unwarranted, but it's dangerous and exploitable.

I know one of the reasons Trump keeps the volume so high on some of these issues is to keep his guys in the ring, to make it seem like it's a constant fight, because when you're in the fight, you got to punch. You gotta, you got to stay in the battle. If you actually when it's over and you sit around, you know, that guy that was a worthy opponent, you know, that was, you know, and you think more and you come to respect that person and maybe you talk to that person because the fight's not on. And then you learn something from that person. Oh, we're members of the same club, we shop at the same place. You know, we both have lost our jobs in this economy.

I've got more latitude than you. The concern about Trump is the fight never ends. The fight never ends. And I think partly because he doesn't have that great of an interest in the actual substance of solving problems. Everything for him is part of the same deal, which is how do I promote the interests of Donald Trump? So, you know, would he like to have accomplishments that people, you know, would he like to have his own Obamacare or something that he can you know, that that makes him a significant figure for something other than fighting? Yeah, but I don't think he has the sort of kind of intellectual interest in doing the kind of work or the ability to sit down with people and and have those kinds of discussions. But that doesn't mean that the people. There are a lot of people who are fellow travelers because they feel they have to be, who probably would like to do that. And the question is, you know, if he wins, will they have that opportunity?

I think one of the giant questions, if he wins, is who comes into government, because last time he did bring a lot of serious people into government, Most of them didn't last very long. You know, there were people who said, okay, maybe this guy is not my cup of tea, but I get to be Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson. I get to be Chief of Staff, John Kelly. There were serious people who took some of these jobs.

None of whom are supporting.

Most of them have written books talking about what a horror show it was. And so, you know, he says Project 2025 is not his. And he can say that because he did not write the book. But the hundreds of people on the roster who did or.

Didn't JD Vance write the forward?

He wrote the foreword. Yeah. These are their intellectual allies. They're intellectual brothers. And a lot of them served in the Trump administration and would be the you know, we know they're the people Trump is loyal to. They're the ones who stayed loyal to Trump. And we do know.

Well, we know loyalty is the thing that he. I mean, what is his, of all his grievancesm what is his greatest grievance? It's that Pence and others didn't stand up for him and do what was necessary to overturn the election. I don't think he's going to make that same mistake twice.

Well, I mean, you know, it's been 100 times now, but just in the one New York Times podcast the other day, when J.D. Vance was asked five times, he refused to say that Donald Trump lost the election. Donald Trump lost the election. Donald Trump lost the election. Then he, you know, used every legal means, which he's entitled to, to ask for the recounts or ask for this and ask for that and to go to court 70 times to even judges he appointed said there's nothing here. The Supreme Court that is heavily influenced by him said there's nothing here. Please go away. And yet he still. So. Well, my theory on that is look. If J.D. Vance or Donald Trump were to concede, okay, we lost the 2020 election. Well, that's the biggest of the lies or the most constant of the lies. And so if you admit that one's a lie, then the pyramid collapses, right? The whole house of lies collapses. So they can't do it. They can't do it.

And does it concern you? I mean, this is a rhetorical question. I shouldn't even ask it this way. But. When you and I started in this business in the Pleistocene Age, we didn't. The idea that you could just make make stuff up and stuff on a grand magnitude like that and could sway large numbers of people to believe you because they have faith in you would have seemed inconceivable. But I'm moved by what our colleague at CNN, Alyssa Farah Griffin, said, who worked for Trump as his communications director. She said he called her in once and he said, just say it enough and they'll believe it. And, you know, now we see the Springfield, the story about Springfield, the story about Aurora, the story about the town in Pennsylvania. These towns are collateral damage. He's using them as a vehicle to raise anxiety about immigration because the border isn't as isn't what it was, you know, a year ago. But. It's kind of remarkable that we're here, and it does raise the point. Trump is very competitive in this race, and it does raise the question, what is holding people back? And so I'm asking you, this is sort of a last question about your journeys. These conflicted people, you mentioned the Republicans and. But there's something about his character, as well. And what do you hear about that? We've talked about what their concerns about Kamala are. What about their concerns about him?

Starting to hear that from independents or soft Republicans, I would call them. Suresh Sharma, a guy we met on our last Georgia trip. He used to work for NASA, used to work for General Electric. Now he runs his own consulting firm looking for startups, technical technologically start ups to fund them. And he's literally, you know, a textbook independent. Voted Trump in 2016, voted Biden in 2020. It goes back He has this three point test. And the last point of his test is character. He says, can I look my son in my daughter in the eye and say, that's a role model? That's a president, look up to that person, whether I vote for them or not. You know, that's how we were raised, right? You know, you respected the president. You respected the presidency. And that was his test. He said I can't vote for Trump. I can't look my kids in the eye and say, you know, respect that guy. Be like that. Be like that.

How about people who say, I think he's a jerk, but he'd be better for my pocketbook?

One of our first voters. It's there's two levels of that. One is, yes, he'll Washington is not going to do much for me, but Trump will close the border and cut my taxes. I'll take it. And I think I've learned how to block out all that chaos. You know, now that I'm familiar with it, when he start if he gets back on Twitter or social, Truth social or whatever he's doing to cause all that chaos, you know, we're all more familiar now with the loud age we live in, and I'll find a way to turn it down. We'll see if that actually if they can actually do that. But it's transactional like him. So you know that he'll close the border, I'll cut my taxes. I want those two things. I'll block it all out. Or he's a jerk, but I'm a Republican and I want lower taxes. And I don't trust Kamala Harris or she's from San Francisco.

Seems to me that. Yes. And by the way, those ads they've run about her and transition surgery for prisoners and how she fought to pay for that in California, I think has done more damage than is is real, as you may hear it.

I agree with you. And they're on during the baseball playoffs and they're on during college football. Yeah. So they're going after the Trump voters. And it's the tag line, too. The Republican Jewish Coalition also has an ad, it's mostly on Fox. But what linking her to the Squad. And it's it's you know Trump is for you. She is for them. It's to try to push her, to make her different. Now they tried this.

On the trans spot, you know, was if you think this is if this sounds insane it's because it is. So you know so the basic thing is she is not one of you.

Because there are a lot of people there are a lot of Republicans who voted for Joe Biden. You know, they didn't like the chaos. And the last straw was, Hey, Dr. Birx, don't you think we should think about ingesting bleach? Right. That was it. That's what that's what made Joe Biden president. It was like, okay, we need an adult. We need an adult and we need an adult now.Tthat's what made Joe Biden president. And so a lot of those, you know, again, Philadelphia suburbs, Maricopa County, that's what flipped Georgia and that's what flipped Arizona. People in the suburbs who are Republicans, those states are moving demographically. They were probably going to become blue eventually. They became blue faster because a whole lot of Republicans said, I can't do this. But they're Republicans. Their DNA is Republicans. That was the first Democrat for president most of them ever voted for, Joe Biden in 2020. If it were Joe Biden, the same Joe Biden in 2024, they would have voted for him. But they watched the debate. They were not going to vote for him after that. And now the, not Trump the candidate, but Trump the campaign on television have done a very good job saying Kamala Harris is not Joe Biden. She's way left of Joe Biden, if you might want to.

Well, on the one hand they say she is a continuation of Biden's policies on the border and on the economy. But but she's also not from anywhere you know.

People want change. This is a very change.

Question is change from what.

That's what makes it so hard. Because, you know, again, you you have a former president and a vice president. So there's not a newcomer. You know, this is this is the environment. You know, you guys ran a great campaign. I'm not trying to say, but you also ran an environment where people want to change, like the Iraq war was going on full. So you had a candidate who looked like change, talked like change and gave people a lot of hope. You know, you can argue it if you want. You were going to win the election anyway, and you ran such a good campaign, you had such a good candidate, you blew the map away, Right? You you added, you added to your winning and your margin. It was a little harder four years later. Right. But but because you had that moment, Joe Biden had that moment in 2020, what's the moment? We have a former president who's running this dark campaign. He'll round them up, throw them out, rally the military against the enemy from within. You ever think you hear that in your lifetime, a serious, serious candidate for president United States say we're going to use the military to get the enemy from within? And then you have a vice president who became the nominee, you know, had 3 or 4 months to run the campaign. So we've never been here. I always say about Donald Trump, whatever you think about him, he keeps taking us to places we've never been. So we've never been here.

The question is whether people want to turn the page. He's really dominated the last ten years. The question is, do people want to turn the page on that or do they want to turn the page on Biden's policies?

Both, unfortunately, I think that you hit that bang on the nail. They want they want both. And the question is, they got to look at what they have here. So I am convinced from all the data and from my travels that in the swing states that will decide this election, there is not majority support for Trump or Trumpism. There is not. If you look at the polls, he's a flatline in those states 2016, 2020, and where he is in the polling now is all between 47 and 49%. Every now and then you'll see him at 50 in 1 of those states. But if you look at them, if you know, if you look at 99 out of 100, he's at 47, 48. She has to get to 49. She might have to get to 49.5. The third party candidates that we thought a few months ago are going to be a big impact on this race, that's dropped a lot. I do think Michigan could be an exception there with Jill Stein, because of the Muslim and the Arab population.

Have you spent time with Arabs, with Palestinians, now Lebanese, and Jews.?

Yes, both both. The Jews I've interviewed for the pieces are younger and they're going to vote Harris. But they do talk about some of their older relatives and friends or people they know who are mad and who want stronger. They want Trump to give Bibi even more of a green light. You do hear that somewhat among the Arab Palestinian community. It's a split in that some. The longer this has gone on, which makes it more painful and now it's spread up into Lebanon, which makes it even more painful. Some of them are just, I can't do it. So I think that's going to, they're not going vote for Trump. Most of them are not going to vote for Trump. He's the guy with the Muslim ban.

But it'll deprive her of vote.

It'll subtract votes there. There are a couple of progressive groups in the Arabic community out there, and the Harris campaign has worked very hard at this. This is a huge step up to try to make up. Yeah, I know you're mad at me. This is one that, I've talked before about go into a union hall and get yelled at. Their campaign has actually done a very good job of going in to rooms with these people and say, we know you're mad. We respect your anger. Climate change, LGBTQ rights, you know, abortion rights, economic policies, tolerance, you know, broader issues of tolerance to try to make the case that, yes, I know you're not going to check that box for us, that we understand that, we respect your anger. But look at this other list. So can they mitigate the number some in the final weeks? That's why, you know, that's why you go to the last day. I talked at the beginning about how complicated the math is. Right. You're losing a little bit here. But are you gaining a little bit here? That, Michigan and Nevada are the two states that I treat as different because they have they have unique internal, you know, within their state borders, unique issues that other places don't have. In Nevada, it's the economy. In Michigan, it is the Arab population.

We've got to run. But I just have to ask you one thing as we leave. I so admire dyou and admire you because in the midst of the pandemic, when you were urging people to take precautions, you disclosed that you have been fighting multiple sclerosis since, for for years. And what what this all meant to people like you and who are who were vulnerable, more vulnerable. First of all, how are you doing on the road? And secondly, how much was that an impetus for you to want to get back out there again?

'I don't remember thinking about it as the, I want to do this, you know, going into the boss's office and saying, I want to do this. I will say that when I was thinking about I had to think about the physical challenge of it. Was I up to the physical challenge of it? And I'm really proud, I have busted my you know what. You know, if we have a 6 a.m. interview, I'm at the hotel gym at four in the morning because I need to exercise every day. I have to get adrenaline into my system or else by the end of the end of every day, I get really, really bad to close to paralyzing sometimes headaches from MS fatigue. But this has been a whole new world for me because I was at home having a show at a studio. Yet you know your schedule. So now I'm in a world where I don't know my schedule. My schedule changes every day, and sometimes it changes within that day when somebody cancels or some opportunity comes up. But having managed that, I'm really proud of and it's been a great challenge. I get reluctant sometimes to talk about this because the disease is so cruel to so many people and they go from being athletes and dancers and factory workers to to wheelchairs, sometimes within a year or less. I'm lucky. I'm in the relapsing remitting spectrum. I have really bad days. I have really challenging days, but I've learned to manage it and have great doctors, people around me, including my family who support me. I've actually learned a lot more about managing it. I feel great. I feel much better than I thought I would at this point. After 15 months on the road. To the beginning of the question, the thing that frustrated me and I probably shouldn't have done this, because it was kind of it was in its way a political statement. I try to stay away from those. Is that you had all these people on you-know-what network saying it was the government trying to force you to wear a mask or the government trying to force a vaccine down your throat. And some of those things maybe did get too political. My point was, I have learned from 16 years of managing this disease, that I have something invisible. You have no idea until I told said that publicly. And so how many other people have something invisible? They're dealing with a health challenge, a mental health challenge. Just a bad day. So why bark at the person in front of you who's not moving as quickly as you like or the person who has a mask on? Or the person who somehow seems a little off? You know, they may have some invisible challenge like I have. So it's made me a much more empathetic person, and it's just made me have less patience for the people who decide, you know, they can tell everybody else what to do. Tell yourself what to do. Make your own decisions. You know, this is this is a great line that Governor Walz uses now, but it's a good line. Mind your own business. When it comes to things like that, why not common sense? If somebody wants to wear a mask, you know, they have a brain, too. They're a decent, hardworking person, too. Maybe they want to. Why do you have to get upset about it? Do your thing. Do your thing. So I got animated because I thought some of that was ridiculous and selfish and judgmental and done by people who were vaccinated, were probably wearing masks in crowded places, who were in a public place where they knew that benefited them, that it helped their ratings or it helped their contract or it helped their Twitter feed. And it just well, it pushed me over the edge. And so I said, bullshit.

Well, yeah, I'm glad. I'm I mean, I'm so happy that you did. Amen to all of that. And I'm sure one thing about additional empathy is it only makes you better when you're out there having conversations with other people who have different kinds of struggles in their lives. John King, always a pleasure. Looking forward to to watching these next 21 days or I don't know, when we, by the time it will we it'll be, we'll be inside of the window like 19 days by the time this podcast airs.

We'll be counting, counting and counting. It's gonna take a few days after the election to count them all.

Yeah, well, people will be watching you at that magic wall to figure out what's going on. Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you for listening to The Axe Files, brought to you by the Institute of Politics at the University of Chicago and CNN Audio. The executive producer of the show is Miriam Finder Annenberg. The show is also produced by Saralena Barry, Jeff Fox and Hannah Grace McDonald. And special thanks to our partners at CNN, including Steve Lickteig and Haley Thomas. For more programing from IOP, visit politics dot u chicago dot edu.