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Below is a transcript of an episode of “The Opinions.” We recommend listening to it in its original form for the full effect. You can do so using the player above or on the NYTimes app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. The transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity. Michelle Cottle: It was a huge week for the Democrats. The party scored major victories in high-profile elections in New York, New Jersey, Virginia and California. Voters were fired up. Turnout was high. Even political junkies obsessively following these races — myself included — were surprised by the severity of the spanking that Republicans took. So I want to get this conversation started by talking about what all of this means for the Democratic Party, for the Republican Party and where American politics are headed next. Jamelle and David, I want your first thoughts. Give me your headline for what Tuesday’s election says about the country at this moment. Jamelle Bouie: I wrote this the night of the elections, but this is just a reminder that Donald Trump has never been a particularly good vote-getter for other Republicans. For himself, he’s been a very effective vote-getter. And he’s able to turn broad unpopularity into narrow electoral wins through his ability to mobilize infrequent and low-propensity voters. But when it comes to other Republicans, when he’s not on the ballot, he’s an albatross around their necks, and that’s been consistently the case. That was true in 2017. That was true in 2018. That was true in 2022. And it’s true this year in 2025. When Trump is on the ballot, voters will turn out to vote for Donald Trump. And I think that Republicans should not dismiss this as a bunch of blue states. Had these elections gone the other way — had Spanberger underperformed the averages, had Jay Jones lost, had Mikie Sherrill lost, which the polling suggested was a possibility — and if Andrew Cuomo had won. Republicans should be crowing right now about how they’ve made inroads into blue states. So what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. The scale of the Democratic wins should be a flashing warning sign to the Republican Party. Not just that the national environment is very favorable to Democrats, but that voters have ceased making distinctions between Trump and other Republicans. They’re treating other Republicans like they would treat Trump. And that is the nightmare scenario. It makes it much more difficult for incumbents next year to distance themselves from the president. So I would say if I were a Republican incumbent right now, I would be thinking: What can I do to distance myself from Trump? And interestingly, like, the one Republican who seems to have gotten this message is Marjorie Taylor Greene, of all people. David French: OK, a couple of things. First, we do not under any circumstances have to hand it to Marjorie Taylor Greene for anything. Cottle: So harsh. French: Let me look at this from the standpoint of a similar metric that Republicans used after the 2024 election, to indicate that their win in their view was broader than maybe the final outcome indicated. And that was that all kinds of places all across America, from blue counties to red counties, they all went more red. And so that gave a lot of Republicans this idea that what we’ve done is we’ve started a realignment. We started a push of the whole country more in this rightward direction. But if you apply the same analysis now, late in the evening on Tuesday, it looked as if every single Republican — I mean every single Virginia county — was more blue in 2025 than it was in 2021. So applying that same metric, that would be a real warning sign for Republicans. Second, I really agree with Jamelle. We have been down this road for 10 years now. The MAGA world does not tend to do well when they’re not named Donald Trump, unless they’re in a super, super, super red place. When I was writing my book several years ago, at the very beginning of the pandemic, when I was wrapping it up, I did this thing where I went and I looked back at every rhetoric around every election cycle. So whether it was Bush winning re-election in 2004, the Democrats having a big 2006, Obama’s ascendance in 2008, the Tea Party revolution in 2010, the rhetoric was always the same. It was: We’ve cracked the code, we’ve figured it out, we’ve got the realignment. It is: We are winning from now on. And so you had that exact same rhetoric after Trump won in 2024. But if you have a memory greater than a goldfish, you know that unless you actually sit down, hunker down and govern well and deal with core concerns of constituents, your victory is ephemeral. And so what did Trump do? He didn’t sit down and focus like a laser on inflation and grocery prices and all of that stuff. He launched his vengeance tour. He has squandered the good will that he had when he was inaugurated in near record speed — maybe the only speed that eclipsed his first squandering in 2017. Cottle: Although to be fair, David, he is building a glorious ballroom. I mean, that is what we all voted for, right? French: OK. Can I say something that might sound lunacy? I think the ballroom might have mattered to people a little bit more than I thought. Bouie: I think so, too. I think so, too. French: Yeah, and I’ll tell you why I think that: Because it’s visual. It’s visual. Cottle: Oh, everything with him is visual. French: Well, the rule of law is not visual. The Constitution, I mean, you can see it in a case, but as a general matter for people, the Constitution is not visible. Corruption — unless you actually have it recorded on video — is not super visible. But you tear down the White House without asking anybody’s permission — it’s a living symbol that he’s gone rogue. It’s a very visual representation that he’s gone rogue. I think it didn’t do him many favors. Cottle: I know. I want to totally agree with both of you on the matter of the electorate. So I believe that the electorate tends to be thermostatic from one election to the next. You see it in Virginia, especially whatever party is in the White House one year. The next year, when they do the governor’s election, they almost always go the opposite way. They did it again this year. So with individual races, individual cycles, I see that happening. But then I also am a firm believer, longer term, that politics is a cycle. That wheel of fortune is coming back around to bite you on the [expletive] at some point. Especially — and it goes slower, faster in part, depending on how much overreach a party plays with. But I think, certainly in this narrow, off-year race, we saw the thermostatic at play. I’m kind of hopeful that I smell a cycle starting to shift and people are going to start moving back in a different direction than what we’ve been embracing for the last few years. Hope springs eternal, but I agree that it’s not just New Jersey or New York or Virginia. We had the Georgia Public Service Commission give Democrats two extra states by some enormous margin. You saw Pennsylvania Democrats manage to hold their Supreme Court majority against their State Supreme Court majority, against what expectations were. It was a serious, thorough thumping. So if I were Republicans right now, I’d be sweating it. Bouie: I have to say, so much of this was predictable. Beyond the fact of Trump being bad for down-ballot Republicans, what do you expect to happen when you give Elon Musk, Russell Vought and Stephen Miller control of the federal government to let them do as they please? There’s two reasons why that was an insane choice. The first, of course, is that these are ideological extremists whose own personal agendas are divergent from that of the American public and have really nothing to do with what voters thought they were voting for. At least the critical voters thought they were voting for the 2024 election. But the other thing, and this is, I think, a little underrated, is that they’re not politicians. They’re just ideologues. They just have these substantive goals and they do not — or are unwilling to moderate or weigh those substantive goals against political realities, against the likely reactions from voters and lawmakers in civil society. And so if you are hellbent on pursuing your ideological agenda, voters are going to respond very angrily because voters generally do not like hard ideologues. They may be willing to tolerate and support a set of ideological principles in the Reagan era, small government in the F.D.R. era, an interventionist government, but the kind of hard, ideological, rigid approach, they do not like. And what’s strange to me, honestly, is the extent to which a lot of people — prominent political observers, business leaders, civil society leaders — somehow got it in their minds that the country had become permanently MAGA. So political gravity no longer exists; none of that matters. This Tuesday demonstrates the shortsightedness of so many people in the wake of Trump’s re-election. French: I keep thinking back to 2024, and I remember writing about this at the time, that if you followed Trump at the rallies, that was one reality. If you followed Trump by commercials on TV or social media ads or whatever, you’re a disengaged voter. One of those low propensity voters that Jamelle talked about, where you’re not getting really your news from anywhere, you’re just sort of living your life and politics intrudes on it in some ways, mainly through TV commercials, et cetera. Then there were just two totally different candidates running for president. The rally Trump was vengeance, conspiracies, vengeance, conspiracies. Audio clip from Trump rally: For hardworking Americans, Nov. 5 will be the new liberation day. But for the liars and cheaters and fraudsters and imposters, who have commandeered our government, it’ll be their judgement day. French: The TV commercial Trump was inflation, immigration, inflation, immigration. Audio clip of Trump Ad: We’d created 7 million new jobs, and it lead to a growth like we’ve never seen before. We’d developed the greatest economy in history by far. French: — that was commercial Trump. And commercial Trump is the one who really won the election, not rally Trump. But rally Trump is the one who’s governing the country. The Trump administration in a lot of ways misread its victory in a pretty dramatic fashion. It was not a mandate to pardon all the Jan. 6-ers. It was not a mandate to go after every dissenting law firm in America. It was not a mandate to put masked police all over the streets of American cities and engage in gross and brutal acts of violence out in public on a nearly daily basis. It was not a mandate to engineer military deployments to American cities on obviously false, fake pretext. So, look, none of this should be surprising. This wasn’t what he was elected by, the big mass of people who are not MAGA. Now, you will find on Twitter all the time this sentiment where it’s a very brutal video or a very vicious statement from Trump and people will say, “I voted for this.” Or the grainy videos of the drone strikes or the airstrikes in, outside of Venezuela. Cottle: Yeah, but Twitter’s still not real life. French: That’s what I’m saying — that’s not real life. They have convinced themselves it is. And then the other thing here is that unless the Republicans course-correct, unless they get this through their heads, they’re going to continue to have this problem: There’s no sign that the administration itself is really keeping its eye on the public as opposed to this weird, bespoke world of right-wing influencers. This is how they’re gauging themselves a lot, is: How is the right-wing podcast world or the right-wing Twitter world reacting to me? And they’re exquisitely sensitive about that, and they don’t give a rip about normal political metrics and measures and normal political rhetoric. So if they keep doing this, we are not on their floor yet. We are nowhere near their floor. Cottle: And they have been consoling themselves anytime they feel nervous with the idea that Democrats are even less popular than they are. So this was the first time since Trump’s re-election that voters have had a substantial opportunity to push back. And they have. So I want to get into a little bit of the juicy details on this, because, again, the early evidence is that it’s not just that more Democrats turned out, which they did, but also that there were votes stolen from Trump voters — not, oh my God, I don’t want to say that. There were votes —— Bouie: Stop the steal, Michelle. Cottle: People who were supporting Trump shifted over to the blue team. So we talked about how toxic the brand is for Democrats, but what happened here? Bouie: My read of this is that obviously you have voters with strong and deeply felt partisan identities, but, like a lot of voters, their sense of either party is very conditional and provisional. It sort of depends on the broad set of messages they’re getting from all the different kinds of sources that are in their life, whether that’s media or social media or family or friends or what have you. And when it comes to the Democratic Party, I think that first, in an election year, top-of-the-ticket candidates have an opportunity to define the party’s brand to a certain extent. They can’t fully define it, but for the voters that they’re reaching to, they can create their sense of what a Democrat is. In Virginia and in New York City and in New Jersey, even to an extent, the brand that the top of the ticket Democrats created was: Hey, we want these jobs, first of all, we’re happy to serve you. This was Mamdani’s big thing; he always has a smile on his face. It’s very clear that part of his brand is like: I want to be mayor of New York and I want to serve you. Spanberger, as well. So much of her pitch to voters wasn’t just “I’m anti-Trump” but, instead, “I really want to be governor and I really want to be governor to serve you.” And then the relentless focus on affordability that you saw on all the top-of-the-ticket Democratic campaigns, I think it just created a positive impression of the Democratic Party for the voters that these candidates reached. The other thing is, I think the shutdown is something to play with this. When you drill down in polls of the Democratic Party’s low popularity, I’d say half of it is just general anti-party sentiment. Voters just don’t like political parties, and I’d say a solid third of it is Democrats themselves —— Cottle: Yeah, people are surly. Bouie: Self-identified Democrats, people with deep partisan feelings, saying: I wish the party would be more aggressive. I wish they would fight back. I wish they wouldn’t be a bunch of weenies. And the shutdown, in a funny way, by Democrats kind of holding the line on the shutdown, may have served to improve the party’s position with its own voters. Because voters can say: Oh, look, Democrats aren’t backing down. They’re doing what we want them to do. And I would bet that this has also contributed to a more positive feeling. I feel like the big lesson people need to take from everything, from all politics, is that nothing is static; nothing stays the same. There’s no such thing as a singular majority. There’s no such thing as a singular people. Everything is fluid. Everything moves, everything changes. And so, for Democrats having won this victory, they have to actually do things to maintain the momentum in the respective states. They actually have to deliver the things they promised they would deliver. And for the legislative party, I think it continues to adopt this posture of opposition — to continuously signal to voters that if you put us back into power, we are going to fight for you. And then, when, if they get into power, they have to deliver on this. They have to deliver, and if they do not deliver, the thermostatic public will react accordingly. French: When you look at New Jersey and Virginia in particular, I think one thing that’s interesting about both candidates is that both candidates in New Jersey and Virginia really don’t fit well with the Republican messaging about what the Democratic Party is. So Republican messaging for a long time — especially including Republican messaging on Republican networks, like Fox News and Newsmax, et cetera — has been to basically cast the median Democrat as a 2020 rioter. I’m only slightly exaggerating here, that the median Democrat is an absolute wild-eyed radical. And so you may have your qualms about Trump, or you may in ordinary times not be super excited about masked people in the streets, but these people, these people are the worst. They’re horrific. And so then you have Spanberger, Sherrill, and they present about as opposite from that as you can imagine — neither one of them sets the world on fire in the charisma category, but in many ways, that’s actually a little bit in their favor. So I think that the Democrats did a good job running people who are sort of living contradictions to a lot of Republican messaging. And I do feel like in some ways that Republican messaging — and it will keep up because this is the irresistible momentum on the moment on the right is everything is taken to 11, everything is hyperbole — that you’re going to continue to see this. But if the Democrats are attacking towards reasonable, normal — towards somebody that you wouldn’t be afraid if your kids are around them too much, then you’re talking about a situation in which they’re just going to be a living contradiction to a lot of Republican messaging. And the more the Republicans live in that alternative universe, the more vulnerable they’re going to be. Cottle: This is something that I did a lot of reporting into this year. The kind of national security moms, which, Abigail Spanberger has a background in the C.I.A. and federal law enforcement and Mikie Sherrill was in the military for years. And it’s this interesting combination, where I talked to some Democrats who were pointing out that the caricature of a national Democrat is weak, woke and whiny. And both of these women, you can’t stick that to them. They tried to paint them as extremists in certain ways, but you can’t paint them as soft on crime like you’d want to. Abigail Spanberger did counterterrorism work for the C.I.A. They are not weak, woke, whiny. But at the same time, because they’re moms, they can talk about their kids and their concerns about schools and jobs and economies and safety and housing. I traveled on the trail with Spanberger a fair amount, and it was great to see that she could take those criticisms and just kind of jujitsu them to her advantage. So I agree that with governors in particular, there is this opportunity to redefine the brand because you’re not having to worry about all those team dynamics. And I think both of them did a good job. But all three of them, I just want to stress again, what did they focus on? All three of them focused on affordability. Their opponents tried their best to make this about the culture wars in Virginia. Winsome Earle-Sears aired ads that were explicitly anti-trans, trying to paint Abigail Spanberger as very extremist on this. She even had the riff that they had used on Kamala Harris last time, which is that Abigail Spanberger is for they/them, not us. But it did not work. And I think you have gotten to the heart of why that is, David. It looks like they weren’t addressing the actual candidates they were running against — they were running against the national brand. French: Yeah, exactly. Cottle: Other than the affordability, did you guys detect other through lines with the high-profile races we’ve been talking about? Bouie: I think affordability is the big thing. There’s been this ongoing debate about what Democrats should do, but I think to an extent what you see is they should run candidates that fit the particular areas that they are campaigning for, and those campaigns should be voter-focused. They should listen to what the voters are talking about, what voters care about, and then focus on that. And where ideology or approach might come in — and where district comes in — is in how a candidate interprets what that means. So Mamdani in New York City is hearing voters say, “I care about the cost of living.” Given his political background and his sense of how things should go, he says: Oh, I’m going to address that with more government-focused solutions. But I’m a big believer in letting candidates figure out what works for them in their particular situations. Let the candidates do the kind of serious outreach to voters that only comes through campaigning — not through focus groups or testing ads. Cottle: Well, that was one of the things Mamdani was so great at. A lot of his stuff won’t necessarily translate outside of New York, and he just has that very intangible “it” quality that you cannot train. Like Abigail Spanberger, Mikie Sherrill — she’s never going to be that. Mamdani also just worked his butt off. He got out there, talked to voters, built a ground game, and he had the good fortune of being up against Andrew Cuomo, who thought he was entitled to this whole job. But you’re right, he was out there listening. Bouie: Yeah, right. And I think that if I had to diagnose a problem with Democratic Party politics over the last half decade, it is not just a defensive crouch, it’s not just a timidity, but it’s sort of this: We can moneyball this. And it’s like, you can’t. You have to have candidates who are willing to work their butts off, who are willing to be campaigning from dawn to dusk. Always be campaigning. Cottle: Always be campaigning. Bouie: And that’s not going to guarantee a win, but it can set up the conditions for winning. It’s an approach that’s translatable. I want to note that in Virginia, Democrats swept the House of Delegates. They have a 64-seat majority going into next year, which is wild. So that’s a really impressive sweep. And part of what the Virginia Democratic Party did was just run candidates everywhere. Every single House of Delegates district had a Democrat running, and some of them got lucky. To me, that’s the formula: Work hard, listen to voters, and the contrast you’re making with your opponent is that you’re actually interested in representing your people. You’re not running to be the president’s little soldier. You’re not running to fight a culture war; you’re running to represent citizens. Cottle: All right, before we shift over to a postmortem for the Republican Party, I did want to dig into one more point, which is that both Spanberger and Sherrill won Latino votes by a two-to-one margin this time around, according to exit polls. Obviously, there’s been a lot of hand-wringing about the rightward shift among Latinos in the Trump era, and with good reason. But what do we make of this particular shift back? French: Oh, Michelle, I’ve got stuff to say about this one. Cottle: Hit me. French: OK, so if you go back to my sort of rally Trumpist versus commercial Trumpist, this is where it’s very salient. Because a lot of your Latino voters who shifted for Trump — what was the situation there? For a lot of them, there were actual concerns about immigration. You have a lot of working-class Hispanic men in particular who moved Republican. This is a group of people who were facing directly — as working-class folks and as folks along the border — the two worst failures of the Biden administration, which were immigration and inflation. And so they’re receiving the brunt of it. So what does Trump do when he comes in? When Trump comes in, he treats all these new Hispanic voters like they’re rally Trumpists. And he thinks — how could anyone believe, even for a second, that you can start stopping anyone who speaks with a Spanish accent, or someone who looks Hispanic, or someone speaking Spanish? That you can start detaining them — sometimes in brutal conditions — disappearing them for days at a time? This is insanity. How did you think that you would retain a Hispanic shift by winning a presidential election and beginning a nationwide racial profiling spree? Republicans, for a lot of very good reasons, took great pride in assembling a much more multiracial working-class coalition. That’s something Republicans have wanted for a very long time, to make the party more diverse, more multiracial. And in 2024, it happened. And then now, what’s one of the most salient issues that the G.O.P. is dealing with in 2025? It’s the shocking realization that all of a sudden there’s a lot of these young fascists — literal fascists in their midst. And this has become the dominant focus for the last several days in particular, after Tucker Carlson hosted Nick Fuentes. You’re not going to keep together a multiracial coalition when you hand the keys to the car to a collection of online edgelords. But that’s what’s happening. Bouie: There’s an extent to which, if you organize a pogrom against people, they’re probably going to vote against you. Cottle: They’re going to take that personally — real personally. French: Jamelle, we don’t need — this is The New York Times. We don’t do hot takes here. That —— Bouie: Yeah, yeah. Cottle: So David, I was going to target you as the formerly proud Republican in the group. The party has just gotten a complete brutal reality check. What do you want to see? Do you have any hope of seeing Republican lawmakers — who must be very nervous heading into the midterms — do anything? At the same time, it’s not like Trump is going to ease up on them; he’s not going to give them room. So what do they do, David? French: Boy, this is a great question. I think you are already seeing the post-Trump infighting emerging. That is happening all around us. It’s just no one is treating Trump directly like a lame duck, but they’re already understanding that Trump is not going to be around forever. Right below all of this, unity behind Trump is the realization that nobody really knows what this coalition is going to look like going forward. Because one thing that Republicans did in 2024 is they created this pretty big tent that just had one condition for membership, and that’s the red hat. If you put on the red hat, you’re with us. What happens when Mr. Red Hat is gone? So prepare to see more and more infighting. But also, I would say prepare to see an emerging resurrection of normie Republicanism. Because —— Cottle: Get out! French: Maybe I’m wildly optimistic. Maybe this is the worst-aging comment I’ll ever make. But if you break the sense that MAGA is the inevitable future of the party, is there a path for a change? If there’s one thing that we’ve learned, MAGA is not in control of its own electoral fate right now. Cottle: OK. Well, the last electoral outcome that I want to get to before we shift gears is California — redistricting. So Trump has been heading up this big push to rig the playing field in his favor. He has been pushing all these Republican state legislatures to redraw their congressional maps: Texas, Missouri, Ohio. But on Tuesday, voters in big blue California were like: Fine, we think we’re going to gerrymander, too. Now, does the election in general that we’ve just seen suggest that maybe trying to slice and dice the electorate whenever the mood strikes carries some risk? There’s the flow that we’re talking about — it’s not a static situation. Should this be a warning about the redistricting craze as well? Bouie: My view is that if I were a Republican incumbent living in a place where they’re trying to do mid-decade redistricting, I would ask them to stop. I think gerrymandering — for good reasons, rightfully — is a scorned term. It’s basically a kind of boogeyman. But I think its status as that makes it hard for people to understand what it actually is. I think people imagine it as creating new voters somehow. But no, you’re shuffling around existing voters. And in places that are already very gerrymandered, it’s actually quite difficult to create more safe seats without sacrificing some safe seats. And what could very easily happen — think about it like this: If you’re trying to do a Republican gerrymander and you have a bunch of dark red squares, moderately red squares and light red squares, and then a couple of deep blue squares, and you want to turn one of those deep blue squares into a red square, the only place you can actually get more red from is your deep red squares. So you move the red over and you make one of those blue squares a light red square, but all of a sudden you now have less red squares. And that’s fine if everything’s static. But if all of a sudden you have a big demographic shift — let’s say you were counting on Hispanic voters to break evenly for you but now they’re breaking against you two to one — all of a sudden your gerrymander, far from protecting your seats, ends up wiping them all out. And I think Tuesday suggests that we’re going to have a very strong Democratic national environment next year. A gerrymander designed to pick up more seats may actually end up becoming what’s known as a “dummy-mander” —— Cottle: I do like that term. Bouie: A redistricting that ends up helping your opponent. And so my hunch is that this is actually going to put a break on all of this. And the fact that Democratic states are willing to go tit-for-tat, I think that also pushes against the inclination — that willingness to sort of play hardball, it may end up de-escalating the situation, which, for me, it’s vindication that you kind of have to play hardball to end hardball. Everyone has to be willing to pull the trigger to get people to put their guns down. Cottle: Trump responded to all of Tuesday night with a little Truth Social tantrum, blaming Republicans for this, in part because of the shutdown. And then just this week, the F.A.A. has taken the shutdown pain a step further. They’re going to have a reduction of 10 percent of air travel flights into certain major hubs. This is only going to make people surlier. What do you think Tuesday does to the shutdown dynamic? Bouie: If I were a Republican in Congress, I’d be like: We’ve got to end this thing. The problem is, the president has no interest in any kind of good-faith negotiation. He doesn’t really know how to do it, and the whole administration’s attitude toward everything is — I wrote this in my column this week — it’s all stick and no carrot. It’s all: We’re going to try to beat you into submission, and we’re never going to offer any concessions. I think this F.A.A. thing is probably necessary, given the strain on air traffic controllers, but also —— Cottle: But it’s going to tick off America. America does not like it when you mess with their holiday travel. Bouie: And they seem to think that if we just make people angry enough, they’ll blame Democrats, and it’s not working. French: Look, this is an administration that is absolutely allergic to compromise. It’s a national party right now that’s absolutely allergic to compromise. And so I don’t know that I see this shutdown ending anytime soon, to be honest. And what incentive did the Democrats have to end it right now? They just had an election in the middle of a shutdown that they were definitely not punished for. For example, the precipitating incident is that the president might have had an affair, and that’s what demands that they have to manufacture this fake war. Today, if news came down that the president had an affair, that would be like a two-hour news story. Like, no one would care. Also, fun fact, the movie comes out before the Monica Lewinsky scandal breaks. Cottle: That I did not remember at all. Bouie: There’s a whole set of movies basically beginning from when Bill Clinton gets into office that I like to describe as “What do you do with the horny president?” movies. And “Wag the Dog” is one of them. “The American President” is one of them. There’s a bunch of them. Cottle: David? French: All right, so this is a streaming recommendation. Big shock. Big shock. But with a caveat. So there are some listeners who may have watched some documentaries on this family from South Carolina named the Murdaughs. This is a sort of a gothic Southern murder mystery story about a very powerful family of South Carolina low-country lawyers. And Hulu has done a mini-series about it. It’s got some great people in it. And I will tell you this: Having grown up in the small-town South, I love and hate this show at the same time. Here’s what I love about it: It’s really captured the good-old-boy-ism of small-town Southern power, captured it very well. Here’s what I hate about it: It has really captured the good-old-boy-ism of Southern life very well, because what it does is it reminds me of a lot of the people I knew growing up in the small-town South. Thankfully, I did not grow up around any lawyer/murderers — thankfully. But as far as the disposition, the temperament, the use of connections, the way in which people escape accountability — all of that stuff is right there in front of you. And it’s kind of a slice of life in a particular kind of American corruption that is both captivating and repulsive at the same time. Cottle: OK, I’m here for it. I grew up not in the small-town South but, like, exurban South, suburban South. I’m sure I will recognize some of these fine folks and all of my relatives in the process. So I’m going completely different. I’m going pomegranates! It’s pomegranate season, people. Not the juice or the little cups of sad seeds that you’ll see sometimes. It is time for the big, honking, red juicy pomegranates. My family is obsessed with them. It’s one of the fruits that you know a little bit like tomatoes: It depends seriously what time of year it is as to what you’re getting. And a good pomegranate in the fall — I’ve got to go for it. They’re a complete mess and they will dye your entire house red, and it will look like you’ve slaughtered small animals with all the juice everywhere. But it’s worth it. Bouie: I was going to say, big, honking and juicy is how they were described in the “Song of Solomon.” It’s a joke for you, David. French: Oh, I get that. I get that. Cottle: Can’t take you guys anywhere. Anywhere. French: What are we doing to this podcast? Cottle: I know, right? On that note, I’m just going to shut this down. We’re landing this plane. You two are dismissed. Thank you so much. Let’s do it again.
