evident by alternatively you could have a really bad environment in 2026 and donald trump could be virtually a lame duck by that point given the present trajectory it's not hard to imagine um and the assumption the counter argument is you know democrats are doing the nancy pelosi thing and making way for the next generation under the assumption that 26 2026 will be an actually a good night which is counterintuitive given the signals that retirements usually send the counter argument to that is rule uh grahalva who passed away yesterday who ran for re-election with stage four cancer knowing that this was probably the likely outcome so there's not necessarily a wave of prudence that's overtaken okay so

prudence dictates that trump will be a lame duck in 2027 because it is very unlikely that republicans retain the house given their one or two seat majority and the dynamic in a midterm like obviously democrats would only need to win four seats, net four or five seats out of 435 against an incumbent president to take control of the House, in which case, advancing the Republican agenda starts coming to a screeching halt. So we're now just here talking about the Senate. I'm just saying that the statewide atmosphere, it's going to be very telling to see what these parties do in these states that are not firmly in one camp or the other, right?

You're assuming coherence on the part of the Democratic Party. And I would just pose this question. Who is the leader of the Democratic Party right now? Because we've got Tim Waltz about to go on a barnstorming tour. We've got Pete Buttigieg kind of, you know, putting his toe in the water. We've got Gavin Newsom sitting down with Steve Bannon. But all of that, and we've got what Chris Murphy and others all sort of jockeying for the role of leader, but who's going to win? I mean, they actually, they're not bold enough to really kind of go for it the way that someone like a Trump or a Vance or on the Republican side would. So they are it's not just that they have these ideological commitments that they're fighting in the House and the Senate. It's that they are leaderless right now, truly leaderless. What

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