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Welcome to FiveThirtyEights politics chat. The transcript below has been lightly edited.

sarah (Sarah Frostenson, politics editor): Were still more than a year away from the 2022 midterm elections, which means it will be a while before we should take those general election polls too seriously. But with a number of elections underway in 2021, not to mention a number of special elections, its worth kicking off the conversation around what we do and dont know about Republicans and Democrats odds headed into the midterms.

Lets start big picture. The longstanding conventional wisdom is that midterm elections generally go well for the party thats not in the White House. Case in point: Since 1946, the presidents party has lost, on average, 27 House seats.

What are our initial thoughts? Is the starting assumption that Republicans should have a good year in 2022?

alex (Alex Samuels, politics reporter): Yes, and heres why: 2022 will be the first federal election after the House map(s) are redrawn. And because Democrats fell short of their 2020 expectations in state legislative races, Republicans have the opportunity to redraw congressional maps that are much more clearly in their favor. On top of that, Republicans are already campaigning on the cost and magnitude of President Bidens policy plans to inspire a backlash from voters.

geoffrey.skelley (Geoffrey Skelley, elections analyst): Simply put, as that chart above shows, the expectation is that Democrats, as the party in the White House, will lose seats in the House.

And because Democrats have such a narrow lead in that chamber, that would mean the GOP is favored to take it. Now, because only one-third of the Senate is up every two years, its not a truly national election the way the House is, so the story there is more complicated.

nrakich (Nathaniel Rakich, elections analyst): What they said!

alex: lol

That said, I think Democrats might find some success campaigning on Bidens accomplishments from his first 100 days: the vaccine rollout and the coronavirus stimulus funding, specifically. But that might not be enough to save Democrats from a midterm shellacking.

nrakich: Yeah, Democrats are obviously hoping they can buck the trend and point to exceptions like Republicans gaining seats in 2002 as evidence that its possible. But George W. Bush was very popular in 2002 in the aftermath of 9/11: According to a retrospective FiveThirtyEight average of polls at the time, he had a 62 percent approval rating and 29 percent disapproval rating on Election Day 2002.

And in this era of polarization where presidential approval ratings are stuck in a very narrow band its hard to imagine Biden ever reaching that level of popularity.

sarah: Were getting ahead of ourselves with the Senate, Geoffrey! Well talk about that more in a minute. But it sounds like our starting point is that 2022 should, in theory, favor Republicans?

That makes sense given the historical record, but to push back on that just a little there are instances when the presidents party didnt do that poorly. For instance, in 1990, when George H.W. Bush was president, Republicans lost eight seats in the House and one seat in the Senate which, as Politifact wrote, was a setback but not exactly a shellacking. Similarly, in 1998, when Bill Clinton was president, Democrats actually picked up five seats in the House and broke even in the Senate. Republicans still controlled both chambers, but the fact that Democrats didnt really lose ground was notable nonetheless.

So is it possible that Democrats wont have that bad of a year?

geoffrey.skelley: As the COVID-19 pandemic recedes, Biden and his team are clearly banking on an economic revival that will buoy his ratings and Democratic fortunes in the midterm.

After all, the times when the presidents party avoided losing much ground in the House or even gained a little came when the incumbent president was very popular. Its going to be hard, as Nathaniel said, for Biden to be at or above 60 percent approval when things are so polarized hes at about 54 percent right now, according to FiveThirtyEights tracker but if he can hang out above 50 percent, that could help Democrats minimize their losses in the House.

alex: And at this point, Democrats seem to be more excited than Republicans about voting in the midterms, per Morning Consult. Their April poll found that 81 percent of Democrats were at least somewhat enthusiastic about voting in the 2022 midterms, compared to 72 percent of Republicans. So not a huge difference, but still interesting.

sarah: What about midterm turnout more broadly? Is there any reason to think that Republicans or Democrats hold an advantage here?

geoffrey.skelley: As a general rule, midterm elections are influenced a lot by what political scientists call differential turnout; that is, your average member of the party thats not in the White House is more likely to turn out than the average member of the presidents party.

In other words, we can probably expect Republican turnout to be up compared to 2018, and Democratic turnout to be down. However, how much more or less is the real question.

nrakich: Some analysts point to the fact that college-educated white voters, who are pretty reliable midterm voters, used to vote Republican but now vote Democratic. And while its true that Democrats have made gains with these voters in recent elections, I think its overstating things to say that will turn midterms into Democratic-friendly environments.

According to a recent report by the Democratic data firm Catalist, college-educated white voters only voted for Biden 54 percent to 46 percent (based on the two-party vote). In other words, theyre still a swing demographic, not part of the Democratic base (yet).

sarah: That certainly seems to be the big question heading into 2022, Nathaniel.

geoffrey.skelley: We shouldnt discount the role persuasion plays in midterm elections, either. Catalists 2018 midterm analysis speaking of them noted that Democrats won over some voters in 2018 who leaned Republican in 2016.

So its possible that if conditions are relatively favorable for Democrats, that might persuade some voters to stick with them and turn out. Alternatively, the GOP might be able to win over some Biden voters if they dont feel good about the status quo.

sarah: What else should we be factoring in to understand the national environment?

nrakich: The two indicators I always look at are polls of the generic congressional ballot (in other words, polls that ask, Would you vote for a Democrat or Republican for Congress?) and special election results (specifically, how much they deviate from a districts base partisanship).

And right now, those indicators point to a neutral or slightly Democratic-leaning environment. We dont have a generic-ballot polling average yet, but the few polls we do have tend to put Democrats up by single digits.

My informal tracking of special election results so far about two dozen mostly legislative elections, so not a huge sample size shows that neither party is significantly overperforming its 2016 presidential performance.

But there is still plenty of time for the national environment to change. In the 2010 election cycle (which, of course, was a great one for Republicans), Republicans didnt take the lead in generic-ballot polling until December 2009.

sarah: But uh the generic ballot polls were really off in 2020. How should we factor that in when thinking about 2022?

As former FiveThirtyEighter Harry Enten argued back in April, we might read Democrats current lead in the generic ballot as a slight GOP advantage, given how much polls underestimated Republicans in 2020.

nrakich: Yeah, Sarah, I think its fair to mentally subtract a few points from Democrats on the generic ballot polls. That would put them right in line with the special-election results so far, which show a more neutral environment.

That said, the generic-ballot polls were spot on in 2018. Our average gave Democrats an 8.7-point lead on Election Day, and they won the national House popular vote by 8.6 points. And 2022, as a midterm year, has more in common with 2018 than 2020.

geoffrey.skelley: Thats right, generic ballot polls tend to be more accurate in midterm elections than in presidential ones.

FiveThirtyEights historical generic ballot polling average on Election Day vs. the actual national popular vote for the U.S. House of Representatives, 1996 to 2020

FiveThirtyEights polling averages are calculated retroactively for years prior to 2018.

Sources: The Cook Political Report, Polls, U.S. House of Representatives

That said, even if its a somewhat neutral environment in 2022 perhaps a best-case scenario for Democrats an evenly divided national popular vote would likely produce a GOP House majority. Why? Even though Biden won the national popular vote by about 4.5 points in 2020, the median House seat only went for him by 2.4 points. Heading into 2022, that bias may only grow, considering that Republicans will draw new congressional lines in a lot more states than Democrats.

alex: Nathaniel has done a great job writing about this, but I think the new voting laws (both the restrictive ones and the expansive ones) should be a factor we examine, too.

While its hard to determine whether these bills will have some sort of partisan impact, its also very possible that young voters and voters of color have a bigger incentive to turn out to vote because of these bills.

nrakich: Yeah, Alex, itll be really interesting to see whether those laws do what they are ostensibly intended to do and depress Democratic turnout or whether they make Democrats more fired up to vote.

sarah: What about the Senate? Republicans must defend more seats than Democrats in 2022, but the Senate is often a more complicated story. Remember, the House experienced a blue wave in 2018, but the Senate actually got redder. Any sense of what to expect this year?

alex: Im less clear on Republicans prospects for taking back the Senate, but I am more inclined to say Democrats can hold onto their narrow majority there.

A piece from The Washington Post in March made the case that less than a dozen seats are really in play, and of those, there are more opportunities for Democratic pickups. For example, the North Carolina and Pennsylvania seats (both previously held by Republicans) might be easier grabs next year since their 2020 margins were so close.

And it could be hard for Republicans to flip the four Democratic seats that are considered competitive Arizona, Georgia, New Hampshire and Nevada. Biden won New Hampshire by 7 points last year! Nevada is also becoming more reliably blue (although it didnt move that much in 2020).

All thats to say, Democrats may really need to go all-in defending just two seats: Georgia (Sen. Raphael Warnocks seat) and Arizona (Sen. Mark Kellys seat).

nrakich: Yeah, this is a big caveat to all the doom and gloom for Democrats. While there is a clear trend of the presidents party losing seats in the House, the pattern isnt as consistent for the Senate.

The presidential partys performance in midterm elections, 1946-2018

2018 change includes the special election result for North Carolinas 9th Congressional District

Seat change calculated by how many seats the presidential party gained or lost based on the number of seats it held on Election Day. Seat vacancies were assigned to the previous party. Party switches after an election were not included in the calculations.

Source: BROOKINGS, GREG GIROUX, MICHAEL DUBIN, U.S. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, U.S. SENATE, UVA CENTER FOR POLITICS, VOTEVIEW.ORG

And the Class III Senate map (the class of senators who will be up for election in 2022) is arguably the most favorable one for Democrats, in terms of presenting opportunities to flip Republican-held seats. There are two Republican-held seats on the ballot in states that Biden carried (Pennsylvania and Wisconsin), and no Democratic-held seats in states that Trump carried.

geoffrey.skelley: Yeah, the makeup of the Senate classes matters a great deal and which party is defending which seats. One reason the GOP gained seats in 2018 was because it was able to pick off Democrats in red states like Indiana, Missouri and North Dakota. So its possible Democrats could find gains in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, or, if things really go their way, perhaps a state that Biden only lost narrowly like Florida or North Carolina.

But one problem for Democrats is that they dont have the same set of juicy targets the GOP did in 2018 with states like Indiana, Missouri and North Dakota clearly red states with Democratic senators. By contrast, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin only went for Biden by around 1 point, and there arent really any clearly blue states with Republican senators up in 2022 (in fact, Sen. Susan Collinss seat in Maine is the only other seat the GOP holds in a Democratic-leaning state, and she won reelection in 2020).

Democrats also hold an array of seats that wont be easy to defend, such as Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and New Hampshire. Its definitely plausible that Democrats successfully defend some of them, but defending all of them, or defending most of them while picking up Pennsylvania or Wisconsin, is a tall order.

sarah: Yeah, Democrats might not have their worst Senate map in 2022, but it will by no means be easy, and how they fare will have a lot to do with the national environment. And as we touched on earlier, Bidens overall approval rating will also make a big difference in Democrats midterm chances.

nrakich: Yeah, if the national environment is even a bit Republican-leaning, that could be enough to allow solid Republican recruits to flip even Nevada and New Hampshire. And then it wouldnt even matter if Democrats win Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

One thing is for sure, though whichever party wins the Senate will have only a narrow majority, so I think were stuck in this era of moderates like Sens. Joe Manchin and Lisa Murkowski controlling every bills fate for at least a while longer.

sarah: Lets talk about big picture strategy, then, and where that leaves us moving forward. Its still early and far too easy to prescribe election narratives that arent grounded in anything, but one gambit the Republican Party seems to be making at this point is that attacking the Democratic Party for being too progressive or woke will help them win.

What do we make of that playbook headed into 2022? Likewise, as the party in charge, what are Democrats planning for?

alex: Im not sure if itll work, but there is a debate in political science right now about the extent to which race-based messaging reduces support for certain policy ideas. In fact, a recent study from Yale political scientists Micah English and Josh Kalla found that highlighting the benefits of progressive policies for racial minorities actually decreases support for them overall, and this was especially true for white respondents. To prove this, the pair conducted an online survey of six progressive policy ideas increasing the minimum wage to $15, forgiving $50,000 in student loan debt, affordable housing, the Green New Deal, Medicare for All, decriminalizing marijuana and erasing prior convictions and asked randomly assigned participants to read about them in either a neutral, race-based, class-based and race-plus-class frame. They found that the class framing was most successful in increasing support for policies across racial and political groups. So Im sure Republicans will try and use this to their advantage given their current emphasis on tackling cancel culture.

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Will 2022 Be A Good Year For Republicans? - FiveThirtyEight

Bill Gates, opinion contributor Published 6:00 a.m. MT May 14, 2021

Opinion: True Republicans would never dream of hiring an unknown cybersecurity firm with no experience auditing elections to chase insane rumors of fraud.

As a lifelong Republican, Im worriedthatmyparty of small government and balanced budgets is being overtaken by conspiracy enablerswhose primary purposeis to promote the Big Lie about the 2020 election.

It doesnt have to be this way.

Strong politicalparties are what make our republic work. Ideas, policies and direction filter up from the left and the right,colliding in thehalls of democracy across the country,andculminatingas the lawof the land.Without two strong parties,onepartydominatesandhalf the populationfeelsunheardandunrepresented. Thelong-termhealth of arepublicrequiresabalance.

Internal party politics always pull to the fringes.As history has shown,humankind finds comfort in their small tribes.But peace and prosperity demandbig tents.

Our best leaders whether Republican or Democrat promote a vision and a set of policiesthat canappeal to most Americans, not just rabid party loyalists.Partiesthatleadwith all citizens in mindcan win independents,win elections and get things done.

I am a Republican. I always have been. In highschool,I started the first Deer Valley High School Young Republicans Club.In college, I was a state officerfor the National College Young Republicans.Later, I worked asa Republicanelection integrity attorney.

My formative teenage political years cameduring the Reagan presidency. My demographic of male,45-55 in age, will showon anypolitical science chart to be one of the most conservativegroups on the spectrum due to Reagans influence.

Looking for the other side of the story? Subscribe today for access to even more opinions.

Im for small government, balanced budgets,efficient processes and just about anyinitiativethat makes the most out ofthe taxpayerdollar.

These beliefs used to defineconservatism.Now, only one thing matters to many Republicans:adherence toany and alltheories that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump.

Maricopa County ballots from the 2020 general election are examined and recounted by contractors hired by the Arizona Senate, May 5, 2021, at the Veterans Memorial Coliseum, Phoenix.(Photo: Mark Henle/The Republic)

As a member of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, I helped oversee and then certify results for three major elections in 2020.I saw the detailed planning done by our elections team, saw themexpertlypivot to make sure people could vote when and how they wanted during a pandemic, and askedtough questions in my oversight roleoncethe results had come inand the protests had begun.

I can say with confidence the election was safe, secureand fair.

There was no foul play.

There was no vote switching.

The November electionwas one of thebest weve ever run.

For certifying and then defending the results of the 2020 general election, Ive been sued, subpoenaed and chastised,primarilyby Republicans.For embracing reality, Ive had my conservative credentials questionedand even my integrity challenged.

I take comfort in knowing that I am doing the moral thing by telling the truth to my constituents.I alsohappen to believetelling the truthaboutthe 2020 electionis good politically.

If Republicansbecome the party of the BigLie if we encourage this madness much longer wewill lose credibility withthe majority ofAmericans on issues where I believe we have better ideas.We will dolasting damage to our republic.

True Republicans would never dream of wasting taxpayer money to hire an unknown cybersecurity firm with no elections auditing experience to audit an election that hasalready been audited.This is what the Arizona Senate is doing with their Cyber Ninja audit.

True Republicans would notstand idly by while auditors paid with taxpayer dollarschasedinsane rumors that ballots were flown in from South Korea to change the outcome of the presidential race, orthatsecret watermarkson the ballotsrevealed by UV lightswouldexpose fraudonce and for all.

This is what the Arizona Senate is doing with their Cyber Ninja audit.

True Republicans wouldinsteadsupport what the Board of Supervisors did to address constituent questions following the November election:

We need more Republicans to return to dealingin truth and reality.

We have been elected to lead, not to appease conspiracy theorists.

We have been elected torestore faith in democracy, not sowendlessseeds of doubt imperiling it.

To save our party, and to save our republic, we need to stop the Big Lie.

Republican Bill Gates represents north Phoenix District 3 on the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors. On Twitter: @billgatesaz.

Read or Share this story: https://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/op-ed/2021/05/14/arizona-republicans-like-bill-gates-must-stop-big-lie-election/5080733001/

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Elected Republicans like me must stop the Big Lie about the 2020 election - The Arizona Republic

Georgias new voting restrictions dominated headlines in March, for numerous reasons: It was one of the closest states in last years presidential election and the focus of former President Donald Trumps pressure campaign to get Republicans to overturn the results; the legislation was written in such a way as to have a disproportionate impact on voters of color; and the law inspired an unusual amount of backlash from corporate America, even spurring Major League Baseball to move its All-Star Game out of the state.

But Georgia is hardly the only state thats made it harder to vote this year. Republican lawmakers have now enacted new voting restrictions in a total of 11 states Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Montana, Utah and Wyoming.

As we wrote in March, Republican state legislators inspired by Trumps baseless claims of voter fraud have introduced hundreds of bills this year that would make it harder to vote. Based on the latest data from the Brennan Center for Justice and our own research, at least 404 voting-restriction bills have now been introduced in 48 state legislatures. Whats more, nearly 90 percent of them were sponsored primarily or entirely by Republicans.

Of course, not all of those bills will pass. Of those 404 bills, we count 179 that are already dead either because they were voted down or werent passed before a key deadline. Another 137 bills have not yet progressed beyond the committee stage, and at this point, that inaction bodes poorly for their chances of passage. On the other hand, 63 bills are still worth watching, having passed at least one step of the legislative process (with those that have passed two chambers closer to passage than those that have just passed committee). That leaves 25 bills that are already law (back in March, this number was only six); four states have even enacted multiple such laws.

The highest-profile voting restriction that has been enacted since Georgias is Senate Bill 90 in Florida. Among other things, the law requires proof of identity for absentee voting, restricts ballot drop boxes to early-voting sites or election offices (where they can only be used if a staff member is physically present), limits how many absentee ballots a person can deliver for non-family members, and makes absentee-ballot requests good for only one election cycle (previously, they were good for two cycles). Critics also fear that the law could allow Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis to stack local election boards with political cronies and intimidate campaigns from giving food and water to voters within 150 feet of a polling place (based on the laws expanded definition of vote solicitation). DeSantis also signed the bill last Thursday at a signing ceremony that was closed to all members of the press except Fox News, contributing to the partisan acrimony over the legislation.

Of course, as in Georgia, its not clear whether Floridas new law will actually boost Republicans chances of winning elections in the perennially competitive state. By making it less easy to vote absentee, the law discourages a voting method that was used overwhelmingly by Democrats in 2020 but was also a source of Republican strength in elections before that.

Other new voting restrictions havent gotten as much attention as Florida and Georgia, but they could still affect voting for millions of people and underscore just how widespread Republicans push to tighten voting laws has been.

In less than five months, 25 new voting restrictions have already been enacted in 2021. Thats a notable uptick from recent years: The Brennan Center tracked only 14 voting restrictions that became law in 2019 and 2020 combined. Its likely, too, that that number will continue to grow. Republicans are expected to add even more laws restricting voting access to the books in the coming months with an omnibus bill in Texas likely to be the next voting restriction to experience the glare of the national spotlight. Stay tuned as we continue to track these bills and explore their implications.

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Where Republicans Have Made It Harder To Vote (So Far) - FiveThirtyEight

Erica Newland serves as counsel for Protect Democracy, a nonprofit organization founded in 2017 to fight democratic breakdown in America. Before Joe Bidens victory was officially confirmed in January, she researched some of the ways that Donald Trumps allies in Congress might sabotage the process. She came to a harrowing conclusion.

It occurred to me, she told her colleagues then, as I dug into the rules and watched what happened, that if the current Republican Party controls both Houses of Congress on Jan. 6, 2025, theres no way if a Democrat is legitimately elected they will get certified as the president-elect.

Liz Cheneys removal from Republican House leadership is the latest sign that Newland is probably right. Todays Republican Party has no political philosophy in the normal sense; it is, rather, organized around fealty to Trump and the stab-in-the-back myth that the election was stolen from him. Cheney had to go because she rejects that lie, recognizing it as inimical to democracy, which she continues to value. Her defenestration is one more indication that the party is preparing to do in the next election what it could not do in the last one.

Absent an overwhelming mobilization by Democrats, Republicans have a good chance of winning the House in 2022. Redistricting alone will probably give them several new seats. They could win the Senate as well. If Biden or another Democrat prevails in 2024, a House run by Kevin McCarthy, the craven minority leader who helped push Cheney out, seems likely to collaborate in right-wing schemes to change the result.

Trumps attempt to steal the 2020 election revealed how much our democracy depends on officials at all levels of government acting honorably. Republicans on state boards of election, like Aaron Van Langevelde in Michigan, had to certify the results correctly. Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger had to resist Trumps entreaties to find enough missing votes to put him over the top. Republican state legislatures had to refuse Trump campaign pressure to substitute their own slate of electors for those chosen by the people. Congress had to do its job in the face of mob violence and count the Electoral College votes. Trumps rolling coup attempt didnt succeed, but it did reveal multiple points at which our system can fail.

Since the election, Republicans, driven by the lie that is now their partys central ideology, have systematically attacked the safeguards that protected the last election. They have sent the message that vigorous defense of democracy is incompatible with a career in Republican politics. (Besides losing her leadership role, Cheney could easily lose her House seat.) Michigan Republicans declined to renominate Van Langevelde to the Board of State Canvassers. Raffensperger will most likely face a tough primary challenge in 2022. As Politico reported, in the next election, there will be secretary of state races in five of the 10 closest battleground states. Republican candidates for those offices will have an incentive to pretend to believe that a great injustice was done to Trump in 2020, and pledge to help rectify it.

Republicans in states like Arizona have proposed laws that would allow state legislatures to override the popular vote and choose their own electors. Right now, these bills have little chance of passing, but other measures to involve state legislatures in vote counting and election certification are being enacted. Georgias new voting law, for example, gives the legislature the power to choose the head of the State Election Board a position formerly held by the secretary of state. The board, in turn, will be invested with the power to investigate and replace local election officials.

Think about what 2020 would have been like if Trump loyalists had controlled the local and state level counting and certification process. Raffensperger did a tremendous job communicating throughout the vote-counting process his confidence in the processes, his confidence in the results, said Jess Marsden, another lawyer for Protect Democracy who researches state laws. You could imagine that a different person in that role could have very much clouded the public perception of the vote-counting process, in a way that would have validated later efforts by legislators to undo the certification to the extent that state law allows.

Some legislatures, she said, might even be prepared to go beyond state law in a way that invites litigation and uncertainty and delay that then invites Congress to step in. Weve already seen how the accretion of lies and confusion about the last election has justified political purges and restrictive new voting laws. Such lies could also give a Republican-controlled Congress a pretext to object to the counting of state electors.

Our current system, Newland told me, provides lots of opportunities for bad actors to claim there are ambiguities and to exploit those claims of ambiguities. They have to believe in the process in order for the process to actually work. Otherwise, they can purposely gum up the works so thoroughly that its impossible to declare a winner.

If that happens, the election would be tossed to the House, with each state delegation getting one vote. Even now, with the House as a whole controlled by Democrats, there are more states whose representatives are predominantly Republican. With enough procedural mischief, politicians representing a minority of the country could hand the presidency to a candidate who got a minority of both the popular and Electoral College votes. If this has never been an evident danger in the past, its because both parties were at least outwardly committed to liberal democracy, and probably thought their voters were, too.

That is no longer true. The Republican electorate, believing that Democratic victories are by their nature illegitimate, demands that everything possible be done to subvert them. For rejecting the anti-democratic turn in her party, Cheney a right-wing extremist in many other regards has been cast out. Republicans are showing us exactly what they expect of their officials. Theyve made it clear that while American democracy was given a reprieve in 2020, the work of repairing it has barely begun.

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Opinion | How Republicans Could Steal the 2024 Election - The New York Times

Republicans will say all kinds of nonsense but theres one phrase mysteriously absent from their vocabulary, comedian Roy Wood Jr. notes in his latest spoof segment for The Daily Show With Trevor Noah.

In the parody Unsolved Mysteries: MAGA edition bit, the correspondent examines why Republicans cant bring themselves to say that President Joe Biden won the 2020 election fair and square.

Republican mouths are unable to formulate these words, Wood says, airing a montage of conservatives swerving questions about the legitimacy of the vote.

Instead, they simply acknowledge Biden is the president in apparent deference to ex-President Donald Trumps election conspiracies.

Republicans seem to know that Joe Biden is the president but not how that happened, said Wood. Do they think a stork delivered Joe Biden to the White House? Do they think he tunneled into the White House, like some sort of reverse Shawshank? Do Republicans believe in an immaculate inauguration where Biden became president without achieving an election?

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Supercut Shows The Phrase Republicans Just Cant Bring Themselves To Say - HuffPost