Our next conversation, well, you guessed presidential politics and more w of our political science profess Kathryn Pearson teaches students at the University of Minnesota.

Among her specialties U.S. Congr in Politics, and Elections.

David Schultz is here.

He teaches politics at Hamlin Un is also an adjunct law professor at the University of St. Thomas.

Well, here we are.

We made it to almost the finish So there's a lot to talk about h Say I keep hearing, Professor Pe the smart people think there could be a double flip in Well, you know, both chambers ha very narrow majorities.

So in the Senate, Democrats have Republicans 49.

And in the House Republicans have a four seat maj But in the Senate, Democrats are structurally disadvantaged.

So a third of all Senate seats are up this cycle.

And of those 34 that are up, two thirds are held by Democrats.

And we already know that, you kn West Virginia is going to flip from a Democratically held seat to a Republican seat.

Montana looks like incumbent Jon Tester will likely be defeat And so that will probably flip.

Now there are several competitiv Sherrod Brown is also trying to to a Republican state of Ohio, but Ted Cruz is looking a little more vulnerable in Texas.

You know, Florida is sort of in but I think the odds are that the Senate will flip.

And then the House, there's so many competitive seats in New and California.

There are about 24 toss-ups total out of 435.

So, you know, not a lot in terms of the percentage of th but 24 seats with the current fo margin means that, you know, it really is in play.

Five in California, four in New where Republicans are holding Biden districts.

Right, absolutely.

- Is that the way to say it?

Yes.

There's so much dysfunction in Washington, people might say, who cares who has the narrow margin in the Well, they might say that, but at the end of the day, it's going to be important in terms of who gets elected president of the United States o one level, because if you get a at the national level, you know, it could have conseque But I'm going to venture and say unless something totally happens that's totally unexpected, there's not going to be a trifec and no one's going to get 60 vot in the Senate.

And the reason why I mention tha that I will almost guarantee you that whatever happens after Elec if you like the word gridlock, it's still going to be there.

It's going to be really hard to sort of move anything, because one side or the other is going to have enough to break, you know, filibusters in the Sen Say getting I'm going to be on C here.

I wonder, given the presidential I mean, both sides are lawyered at this point, right?

I mean, I wonder what kinds of moves to or other things could occur or or since e So this is the really interestin right now, if you're looking at happening in the closing two wee what's really happening at this is that the Harris campaign is putting a lot in to get out t The Trump campaign is putting a into pre pre-election litigation That might tell us something abo relatively speaking, where they their strengths and weaknesses a and what their strategies are to Look at the money where it's goi Well, but it's also important to that Harris has a big lead in campaign finance compared to Tru You know usually we see the two president presidential campaigns being roughly equal.

But here they're really not at a So Harris has a big lead in fund which is allowing her to mobiliz with get out the vote efforts and then especially run ads like Pennsylvania, where they're seei number of ads in a presidential 65 million early votes cast nati Yeah.

- That seems enormous to me.

It is enormous.

But this is the trend that we're since the pandemic at this point What's also significant to think about here is, unlike f ago, where Trump was dissuading early voting, what we're now seeing is a Trump, maybe halfhea but still saying get out and vot And if anybody's trying to sort any wisdom.

My students are going nuts right now, they're trying t at all these different states an what does the early voting tell What's early voting tell you?

It's not really telling us a heck of a lot of anything.

You agree with that?

- Yeah, I agree, I agree.

I mean, I think in terms of redu of voting for the for citizens out there, great that early voting is up.

But I think that you can't tell what that means for who's ahead.

What do you think of the polls, by the way?

Now we just had our friend John McCormick say he wouldn't bet on the accuracy of the polls Would you agree?

I think that the polls tell us t this is a very competitive race and that the seven swing states that we're watching are neck and because they're within the margi - And its been like that all th But I certainly wouldn't read a that says that, you know, Harris lead or Trump has a 1% lead and that is sort of an accurate refl What it means is that it's very Is this a battle of the sexes?

Trump with men, Kamala Harris wi Well, what's so interesting abou race is that gender and the gend is such a prominent part of it, not because Harris is talking ab It's because of the appeals to y and women and sort of trying on to increase the gender gap and on the other to mitigate it.

And we've really never seen so many appeals to young men.

You know, we've talked about soc and sort of suburban moms and women as being, you know, sort of the targets of both camp But in this cycle, we're really seeing young men.

And the reason why we're seeing that, first off, the millennials are close to 40% of the electorate right now.

Across the board, for the millennials and Gen Zs, more likely if they vote to vote One big notable exception white Caucasian males without a colleg they are much more likely if they're going to show up to v are going to vote for Republican So we're looking at dueling deba at this point, or dueling mobilizations.

Harris wants to mobilize everybo who's under the age of 30 except Caucasian men without a college Trump wants to mobilize those pe And so who's going to be more su with those?

I've been saying for about the last two weeks, whoeve mobilize their bloc of young vot better is going to win the elect And what's so interesting about this is until 2016, white voters college degrees split roughly eq and in 2016, they broke heavily And that trend is really continu And so it's that is both a cause of the problems with polling.

Is trying to sort of figure out the demographics of the electora and which groups go for whom, and it's changed.

And then also it's changed the strategy as well.

I want to throw one more thing i If we were having this conversat two years ago, we would all say when it was going to be Trump ve it was dead even in the national and pretty close in the swing st Guess what?

Two years later, even though we switched out cand that's exactly where we are.

This speaks to the intense polar and how few people there are who are truly undecided.

You two have given us such great stuff during the camp Thank you for your time and your service.

We'll have you back after.

Because you have to talk about all this.

You haven't seen the last of us.