Analyzing shifts in voter preferences post-midterms (Part 2)

The governor's race going away. Jon Ossoff won in an absolute landslide in his reelection. We expected those outcomes for the election, but the governor's race looked like it might be close, and it ultimately wasn't. And so you saw a swing of Democrats all over the country, but it was particularly pronounced in the South. And the ones that you just mentioned, are those. The ones that. That really helped you understand the ninth, that really represent how this went. Any other race, state, or voting block that really stood out to you on election night. So there's usually some sort of result early on in the evening that sort of sets the tone for what's going on. One of the first results we got was a big batch of early votes from Hamilton County, Indiana, which is in Victoria, Sparta's congressional district. It's the district that Donald Trump won by little less than 20 points. Hamilton county is an affluent, highly educated, northern suburban county of Indianapolis. But there was a vote drop that came in that was showing the Democrat winning the House election there in a blowout. And I was at the CBS News decision desk, and we were working with Vote Hub, and they said that in their tracking, that initial big vote drop from, from Hamilton County, Indiana, was Harris +4 in 2024, and it was voting for the Democrat in the house race by 27 points. And so that was an immediate sign right off the rip that things were going to be a lot different in 2026 than they were in 2024. I mean, there is an argument that American politics has become a cycle of voters, you know, just swinging back and forth between the two parties, frustrated with whoever's in power. Do you think that's an accurate way to understand what's happening or what do you see happening moving forward? We have had a lot of kind of what people call change elections in recent years. I mean, really the last 20 years of national American elections. The only one that really wasn't a change election in some way was 2012, when Barack Obama got reelected. Democrats held their Senate majority, but Republicans had held the House majority that they had won in 2010. Another change election. We are in a time where we've got pretty low trust in government. The country has, frankly, some big structural problems, and whatever, wherever you are on the political spectrum, you could find things. But I think when you're in a situation like that, it may be that you see people lurching from one party to the other, trying to. Trying to address whatever the problem of the moment is. And I think inflation in particular can just be very corrosive to political coalitions. I think in a lot of ways it contributed to the Democrats losing power in 2024. It certainly, certainly contributed.