Is the blue wave gonna be stymied by not having enough cash to go compete in places where, where they might have otherwise been able to?

Well, I mean, that's, like, to, to Zach's point, that, that's the question here.

Democrats have a target list that's much larger than their ability to actually spend in all these races.

Like, the, the, the D trips target list on the, on the House side is, is over 40 seats, and some of those they haven't spent in at all at this point.

And so there, there is this challenge of recognizing that they have an ideal map here, but also needing to be realistic about how many seats can we really go on the offensive and have the resources to, to go up in paid advertising and hope to sway a significant some, amount of voters.

Our story yesterday was focused on the, on the Senate side because we do have this core battleground.

You're thinking Ohio, Maine, Alaska, even Texas, and so on.

I mean, is it hard to believe that we're not talking about Georgia as a race that we need to be paying close attention to?

Yeah.

Like, what, what happens to the Republican Party after Donald Trump? Like, it, it's unclear.

But it, it will be interesting the next couple months post-midterms to see who starts sticking their neck out and s- and thinking about a 2028 run when it is so clear right now that JD Vance is the front runner.

I think there will be people that are scared to cross the president.

I also think the president is gonna jump in immediately, right? And so Cruz is already kind of putting feelers out.

He has staff that are, that are thinking about this.

Like you mentioned, he's traveling across the country.

Sure.

It, it sounds absolutely fascinating and something we're seeing every day on the campaign trail.

Yeah, I'm, I'm glad Reverend Sharpton is here because he, as he knows, for, for decades we've seen a tradition within the Democratic Party of the Black church speaking out on civil rights and having pastors or religious leaders that run for office and hold office.

Uh, but what's, what seems to be new now is that you have several individuals who are ordained clergy or ministers or pastors running who are part of, of white mainstream prot- Protestant churches, and that's something that the Democratic Party hasn't seen to the degree that we're seeing this cycle in, in several decades.

And Republicans, as, as we've seen through some of those ads, their closing message against them is basically to brand them as radicals, to say that they pretend to be real Christians, but they're not.

We talk so much about Talarico.

Obviously, he's a seminarian.

He's in training to be a pastor.

What did these folks have to say? What are they upset about here?

Well, the ranching industry in the United States has been facing tough times for a number of years.

In addition to what agriculture across the board is feeling right now with high fertilizer prices, high fuel prices, so their input costs are through the roof, ranchers are also dealing with kind of really low herd sizes.

And so there's not a lot of cattle that are being run comparatively with past years.

And so they're already in this process where they're trying to rebuild their herds.

That means that you don't want to kill your cattle, right? You want to just grow up your herd, but that means that you're not getting profits off of selling beef.

So they were already kind of in this tough situation and they would like to see, you know, the White House and the administration prop up the domestic beef industry in order to help rebuild the herd.

This is a narrative I think we're seeing play out in southern Arizona and a tight congressional race here, but in other kind of races around the country as well.

Benson said that that focus will likely continue in the general election, as AIPAC has said that it will continue to oppose El-Sayed's candidacy.

If you watch any of the three debates that they did, it was kind of the main talking point for El-Sayed.

He would constantly bring the conversation back to corporate PAC money, to campaign finance.

We'll see in November how much AIPAC and these other super PACs will play in support of Mike Rogers, the Republican.

It's still kind of an open question, but I think we can certainly expect to see some real money get poured into this battleground.

But if El-Sayed can pull it off, he may very well be seen as a major figure in the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.

My colleagues at Politico have had reporting over the last week or so asking who's gonna be Bernie Sanders' standard-bearer, his successor on kind of this progressive wing of the party.

If he can win in November, if he can win Michigan, which is a key battleground that Trump has won twice in the last three cycles, I think he enters that conversation of someone that knows how to rally kind of the progressive side of this party.

Sam, can you just remind us, bring us up to speed on, on what exactly has unfolded here?

It's one of the most fascinating House primaries this cycle, yet one of the most overlooked ones, in my opinion.

I'm a Westerner.

I'm from Utah, so I love talking about Arizona or Nevada, our neighboring swing states.

But specifically this fifth district.

So this is, this is Andy Biggs' seat.

He left to run for governor.

But then in comes Trump, right? [laughs]