in the end, is this a net-net win for republicans who have some amount of their sanity, a shred of it left? not necessarily. when they did the count of his 35 major legislative proposals, none were enacted into law. as you were reporting, alex, it was really the king maker status and the relationship with the tea party that he leveraged more so than doing anything specific on the hill. having said that, what i think is particularly interesting is this reflects sort of the weird moment that we re in political life in the country. participation is very high. democracy is very low. and so while people are turning out to vote, and we have all this incredible enthusiasm out there. we just had this big long election. we have a congress that everyone knows is broken. we have money that really, you know, floods the system. and we have a senate in particular that has record-breaking filibuster and obstruction rates under this administration as compared to every other in history. so when we lo