What is an incumbent senator being unseated? Tell us about the current state of the GOP in Louisiana.

I actually am fortunate enough to have Senator Cassidy teaching a course in the Honors College this semester.

I will just say, you know, it has become a more Trumpified Republican Party since President Trump returned to the White House last January.

And I'm not going to speak for Senator Cassidy, but I think he thought that he was going to be okay voting to impeach in 2021 and then kind of swing back toward the right during his last Senate term.

And what I think it really did was it won him very few allies in either the Republican party or the movable part of the independents and the Democrats.

So we really had no constituency left by the time the primary happened.

And I think that's just the way it played out.

And and if if Jamie Davis would that at that point, that would mean the wave was so big that that you probably would have already seen every toss up seat in the U.S. go Democratic.

Can you talk a little bit more about the Kansas connections in this book?

I would love to.

Let's start with Kansas as an idea, and then we'll talk about Kansas as an actual place.

The idea of Kansas is the very reason that Abraham Lincoln got back into national politics.

He'd served one term as a congressman from Illinois.

He wanted to stay, but the Whig Party of Illinois said, you know, we're good.

We're going to try someone else.

After spending years immersed in the election of 1860, what do you think Lincoln's greatest political achievement actually was?

In other ways, quite different, I'm guessing.

Yeah, oh my gosh.

I think when we compare our current president to Jackson, it's because they both had kind of an air of populism about their political movement and about their personal style of leadership.

You know, I believe Trump has put a big picture of Jackson back in the Oval Office, but I'm not sure if you can find it amidst all the Home Depot style gilded plastic stuff.

But Jackson was a military leader of great renown.

He was a military hero before he was a politician.

And he famously won the most popular votes in the election of 1824, but was denied the presidency because he did not win in the House of Representatives where the election was decided.

Explain why Harper's Ferry is so important in the election of 1860.

How do you believe Lincoln was able to rise to the top here? What was so brilliant about his campaign?

So if you were like if there were betting markets like Cal Shee back in 1860.

Abraham Lincoln stock would be selling for $0.08 on the dollar in the beginning.

Everybody had heard the name Abraham Lincoln, but mostly because of that famous Senate campaign he runs against Stephen Douglas in Illinois in 1858.

Those Lincoln-Douglas debates, we always hear that term, they were promulgated far and wide in newspapers.

People followed the drama, and he was kind of an up-and-coming guy.

But nobody would have thought that he was a likely major party nominee in 1860.

How did Lincoln perform in Louisiana when it came to votes? How did those results compare to the rest of the South?