Episode 75.G. Elliott Morris, the Economist: Midterms Results Round-up

NICIE PANETTA: Greetings and welcome to a special post-election roundup edition of The MidPod. I'm Nicie Panetta with Heather Atwood. Did you stay up late watching the results last Tuesday night? We sure did and we'd like to thank our local squad for joining us at our potluck watch party. To whoever brought the spinach salad, that was delicious and I want the recipe. Heather made Thomasine Heitkamp's chicken pot pie with biscuits and it was gone in a flash. OK. So as promised we're bringing you a results roundup conversation with Eliot Morris of The Economist magazine. But just to set the stage we wanted to share a few statistics about how we did. In a word we did pretty darn well. We'll caution by saying that not all the votes have been counted and quite a few races are still too close to call. But voter turnout was the highest in a midterm election in 50 years with 47 percent participation. And that's up 10 percentage points from 2014. Lots of work still to do on broadening participation.

NICIE: But that is great stuff. The candidates we interviewed who are in close races most either won or are likely to win as of this recording the weekend after the election and the House did flip. It looks like Democrats will hold about 235 seats. That works out to a net gain of about 39 seats. In the Senate Republicans are estimated to gain about two seats which is not surprising given the map this year although there was a surprise in seeing the margins in some of the red states which were larger than expected and Democrats won seven governorships and over 300 state legislative seats. About a third of the seats that they've lost over the last decade. We definitely saw a blue wave. Also Year of the Woman? Check at least for Democrats. Of the 61 new Democrats in the House of Representatives, 35 will be women and just 19 will be white men. The highest number in history of women will be serving in Congress. OK with that as background let's dive into our conversation with Elliott Morris. Heather and I spoke with him by phone on Friday, November 9th.

NICIE: So we're here with Elliott Morris of The Economist magazine, devoted listeners will remember Elliott from earlier in the cycle. But Elliott please introduce yourself and tell us what you're doing now.

ELLIOTT MORRIS: Great. Well Nicie, Heather thanks for having me on the show today. I again like you said I work for The Economist now I'm a data journalist and my past knowledge of polling election prediction forecasting inform some of the work I do now but largely it's so it's a whole new world for me up here. I think last we spoke I was in Austin, Texas I'm in D.C. now and it's just it's politics all the time. But it's you know there's lots of other things to write about too.

NICIE: Well we got to know you through your forecasting model statistical forecasting model for the House of Representatives and your commentary on Twitter and we have to check in with you and hear what your key takeaways are from the election results.

MORRIS: The election results seem to be very good for forecasters. You know it looks like the pollsters at least on the House level are pretty much dead on forecasts of a wave election I think were correct. There seem to be 35 or 36 flipped or Republican to Democratic seats. I think that is good news for pollsters and forecasters and I myself have you know it's rewarding for me but at the Senate level right I think we have a little different of a story to tell right and that is that polls may have missed the key elections in Indiana maybe a little in Missouri although we knew that Democrats were going to lose a North Dakota Senate seat but overall the two takeaways I would say is that Democrats probably over performed expectations in the House. And pollsters have a victory that I don't think they had last time around.

NICIE: In terms of the House in some ways I was thinking it's almost a boring outcome in the sense that you know you and I have been talking for months now and if if if we had gone back and looked at the generic ballot a year ago it probably would have portended similar results for the House as what we saw.

MORRIS: I think that's right. I began my own personal forecasting model for the 2018 elections about 13 months before they even happened. Just you know just to see as first as an academic exercise and then as a publicly facing forecasting model starting in June and you're exactly right. I mean the confidence intervals with technical language have indicated that Democrats had a large range of pickups since August of last year and ever since it's only grown more apparent that Democrats should pick up the House as that confidence interval really narrowed around the 220 230 seat range. I think you're right. I mean the 2016 election night was quite difficult for a lot of us especially us forecasters who it seems to have to reckon for the first time I think in mainstream election forecasting that our models may have been misinterpreted or misled people but we didn't have to deal with that at all this year. And it's a victory for us as you said it's also maybe a tad boring. We kind of knew it was going to happen since since we first spoke in January.

NICIE: But if we go to that surprise in the Senate and that that was I think somewhat surprising particularly some of the margins that we saw. You were talking on Twitter about how you feel like one of the big takeaways is about rural America. Walk us through that.

MORRIS: So our takeaway about rural America seems to be that whatever shifts we saw in the 2016 election are still there in the public. Although the National Popular Vote shifted left a little bit you know six or seven points from last year. These rural areas are still losing Democrats. Republicans are aligning with the presidential vote in these areas and that has bad news I think for Democrats at the Senate level at the gubernatorial level and eventually probably at the House level too although it seems like we're at a point where Democrats can maintain for now a Democratic House even if they're losing a lot of voters in these rural states.

NICIE: And there's an interesting sort of subtopic here: Health care. Health care was the defining issue for Democrats in this election and arguably of a very key source of strength and of victory. And one of the things we saw was that in numerous rural states these very red states like Idaho like Nebraska ballot initiatives passed to expand Medicaid. How do we put these two things together in our minds?

MORRIS: This is tricky right. So I wrote for The Economist this week about this very mismatch between what seems like a progressive or a demand for progressive policies throughout the United States. Like you said Idaho passed the Medicaid expansion. Michigan passed legal marijuana. They passed Gerrymandering and ballot reform. I think a few other states did the same and then in Florida which has been a little redder then expectations in the past two cycles passed felon re-enfranchisement. Those are undisputed progressive victories in the country right. But what you're picking up on I think is just something we haven't been able to figure out yet. Why in these rural areas where Republicans are dominating elections do people want progressive policy? And now it could be that sadly Republican governance has sort of shifted toward the social issues and really what I'm saying is that immigration racial attitudes and white identity politics have become staples of the Republican Party in rural areas and that it has sort of left an opening for progressive policies to pass in these areas without conflicting with these racial attitudes and you know other Republican identities in the area.

NICIE: And I guess putting on my left of center hat one concern I would have is that essentially Republicans get to have their cake and eat it too. They don't have to pay a penalty for being opposed to these progressive safety-net kinds of policies.

MORRIS: This is hard to figure out too right. We're picking on a lot of really tough topics here. What seems to be a key contradiction in the Trump administration and in statewide Republican governance is that they want all of the social spending. Trump famously said he would defend Medicaid and Medicare defend Social Security in fact shore up all of these social programs but also cut taxes also raise defense spending. And I think the byproduct of this is that we've seen the decline of fiscal conservatism in America. That seems like a really solid conclusion so far there isn't a lot of reputation to that claim. And in states this might matter a little less than it does in the nation as a whole because the federal government with lack of a better term can print thrown money at state governments can't. So I'm from Texas right. Eventually Texas though they have a lot of income from taxes on oil and gas now and what they call the rainy day fund is not going to be able to pay a lot of social programs. In fact you know my family are teachers right. And they've seen a decline over the past 10 years in the amount of money that they get from the federal government, that can only continue if Republicans are going to want to keep cutting taxes but also pay for social programs. So like you're saying it's a contradiction but it also has real consequences I think for policy to the extent that we have our left of center hats on like you said.

NICIE: The other debate I'd be interested in your take on is some observers have been looking at what would be the forecasted outcome for the House this year given the very favorable economic conditions for the governing party and calling the underperformance versus those expectations which is maybe eight or 10 percentage points the popular vote essentially a Trump tax that is being you know borne because of some of Trump's policies and rhetoric. But other people call it a Ryan tax because they feel that it's really the GOP congressional stances on health care and taxes that have cost them at the polls. What's your take on that question?

MORRIS: To the extent that we're trying to decide if the 2018 Democratic wave was a consequence of what you're calling the Ryan or the Trump tax I think it's both. The Trump administration and the legislative branch have actually been on the same sides of most of these issues. If you go online you can look that Republican legislators vote in tune with the president like ninety eight percent of the time. So there's really not a lot of differences between the legislative branch and the executive branch when it comes to party politics and party policy. What Trump supports is generally what Republicans support and vice versa although these things tend to get portrayed differently in the media. Now to talk about something you asked before the tax metaphor the economy did predict that Republicans would have done a little bit better in the midterms than they had. Right. Maybe voters aren't taking the economy into account as much as they used to. So that's why these predictions predicted Republicans would do a little better but the prediction of Democratic seat gain in the house was the same whether or not you used to like the fancy forecasting models that myself and my colleagues at the Economist and other organizations developed or if you just used presidential approval as your only variable in the model. So Donald Trump's 42 percent approval rating predicted that Democrats would gain about 29 or 30 seats in the House and it looks like taking all the other fancy stuff into account they're going to get 35. So it seems like the referendum on the presidency hypothesis is the correct one.

NICIE: Talk to us about this being the year of the woman. What happened there?

MORRIS: 52 or 53 percent of Democratic nominees to the House were women this year which is obviously a majority. I think it's three times or so as much as it's ever been before. It's an undisputed victory for women both representatives and for voters so so what we've been saying is the supply for and demand of women representation in America has been growing sort of voraciously among Democrats in the past five or 10 years. But sadly I don't think we've seen them on the Republican side. So if I were to put on my partisan hat right now I would say that Democrats have an advantage with women that's only going to grow. And that really Republican stances on defunding Planned Parenthood on you know blocking access to abortion have actually cost them votes in America rather than shored up margins maybe among evangelical Protestants and rural America maybe among some more conservative economically progressive but socially conservative people. It seems like now that Democrats are going to have all these women representing them in Congress that they're actually going to be able to deliver on some of these promises. Now there is one complication of course which is that a Conservative majority in the Supreme Court can can really impact policy in a way that they haven't been able to in a very long time.

NICIE: Let's talk a little bit about two topics we've discussed earlier in the cycle turnout and persuasion. First on turnout we will say that one of our key goals in launching The MidPod was to be part of a wave of turnout in this 2018 midterm election cycle. What did you see in terms of turnout?

MORRIS: There was a turnout wave. Plain and simple. More Americans voted in this midterm election than have voted in a midterm election since 1970. I should amend that the turnout rate was higher. Obviously more Americans voted because the country has grown but the share of voters was higher than it has been since the 70s. I mean that's remarkable. The turnout rate this year is going to be something about 45 or 50 percent and the turnout in regular midterms is around 20 or 25. There are voters that are engaged with politics now that haven't been engaged in a very long time. You know it could be that we have charismatic candidates in Texas and Florida in Georgia. Right. And Beto O'Rourke I think it was a very powerful motivator for young and non-white people in Texas.

MORRIS: But the story is nationwide there isn't a magical increase in turnout in states that had charismatic gubernatorial or senatorial candidates right. It's really everybody. But I think there's also some bad news here for Democrats on the horizon and for Republicans and that is that persuasion to the extent that we can analyze patterns of persuasion in the 2018 election which is not that much. It seems like there hasn't been a lot of persuasion. Right so in the New York Times Upshot polls that they did have all these House races roughly equal proportions of Democrats and Republicans, these are people who say they're Democrats and Republicans, supported Democratic and Republican candidates so it doesn't seem like there are a lot of people reaching across the aisle to say let's give Democrats a hand up. Maybe it's the Never-Trumpers who don't like the way the and party is going this thesis that there's some sort of group of Republicans crossing over to help Democrats doesn't actually seem to be true. In fact it's the wave of turnout that we've previously discussed that it seems to give Democrats advantages in the districts that they won.

NICIE: But at the same time we hear a lot of arguing that Tuesday night's results are a victory for the moderate wing of the Democratic Party. Well how would you respond to that?

MORRIS: I would think that's correct. Right. So so the Bernie Sanders endorsed candidates the Our Revolution group Justice Democrats all the progressive groups in America really suffered some bitter defeats in either the primary campaigns or the general election campaigns Tuesday night. So you have candidates in Nebraska's 2nd district I think that were very progressive. What we might call progressive insurgency candidates that lost. And the party endorsed Democrats won as is popularly theorized and politics right. It's hard to lose an election if you don't have the support of the party. So maybe it's an ideological thing but it also could it be just a party apparatus thing. What I will say is that the analysis that I've done here for the Economist it looks like all of these candidates even if they were party endorsed are more liberal than they used to be. So it might not be that Progressives Democratic socialists of America siding with Democrats are getting a lot of electoral victories maybe they're not winning votes but they are winning hearts. I've seen a lot of studies out there you can see this and Pew Research data. You see this in the massive Harvard congressional election study data that there are just more progressives in America both people saying they're progressive and people supporting progressive policies. So maybe Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the only star Liberal candidate that Democrats can point to. But there are a lot of star Liberal voters out there too.

NICIE: Yeah it's an interesting point because we think of some of the candidates we've interviewed for example Harley Rouda in California 48. This is a historically Republican district in Orange County that and he used to be a Republican but he ran on policy a pretty progressive campaign. While at the same time comporting himself like the successful businessman that he is. But if you look at his policies on health care and labor and so forth they're left of what one might expect.

MORRIS: Right. I think Harley Rouda's right. You can be a successful businessman in America and also be a progressive liberal. These things are certainly not mutually exclusive. But to the extent that he's campaigning on one of these two things that gets him more electoral victory than he would expect otherwise. I don't think that I can speak either way to those. Just because we don't have good data on these things what I will say is that Democrats this year seems to be of higher quality than they were in 2016. You know I'm talking about the candidates not the people that the candidates that ran for office earned more money, they signal to donors that they could actually win in these races that they won in. There were a lot of surprise victories Tuesday night. So like the district in Oklahoma the Fifth District that swung to Democrats a wild amount that most of us didn't see coming. There was one election analyst that I will give a shout out on your podcast to Noah Rudnick who I sometimes don't agree with but seems to have projected this before any of us saw it. To call that there's something going on with these candidates in rural districts that are of higher quality. And when you have a high quality candidate in a district that has never had one of those before the election gets a little harder to predict and you can see upsets like we had on Tuesday night.

NICIE: Or South Carolina One with Joe Cunningham who ran a very low key...

MORRIS: This is Katie Arrington's district right. Yeah that was a surprise to me as well. I think our modeling had Arrington winning by about 10 points at last count she's losing by 5 or 6 or sorry a percentage point and a half but still she should have won the district right. This is a candidate quality thing.

NICIE: And I want to put a shout out to Georgia six, were you surprised by that Elliott?

MORRIS: Certainly. It seems like we've come full circle with the election cycle right. It's hard to have woken up on Thursday and seeing Georgia's six switch hands from Handel to Democrats and not think back to the election there which was last last year right in 2017. June 2017, it seems like the entire campaign where the first claims of a blue wave were rising around this time and then a lot of pundits decried this thesis and said that Democrats certainly weren't going to win the House because they couldn't even win in Georgia Sixth Well I think we can just point it back to the district in response to them.

NICIE: OK. And since we're talking about the South and shifts I think we would be remiss if we didn't spend some time on Texas a state you know very well and a state we chose to spend a disproportionate amount of effort on not because we thought it was going to flip blue this year but because we felt strongly it was turning much more purple. Talk to us about your takeaways from the results in Texas including of course the Senate race with Beto O'Rourke.

MORRIS: Well the first thing I'll say is that you're right a lot of people myself excluded to an extent thought that Ted Cruz was going to win a hands down victory in Texas and now he did win but only by about 2 percentage points. I think at last check his margin has slightly decreased from two point three to one point nine or something and this is always fluctuating right. So it's going to be about a two-point victory for Cruz which is closer than any Democrat has come and Texas statewide in about 20 years. This could be because like I said earlier Beto is some charismatic like magical god candidate that Texas has never seen or could be more likely the demographic patterns in the state. Right so more Hispanics getting involved in the political process there registering to vote actually turning out, younger people and suburban white women getting more Democratic.

MORRIS: And you know the younger people especially getting more engaged in the process are turning the state a more purple shade of red. It does seem like this is also the story in other southern states right. We were just talking about Georgia. It seems like it's the case there it might be the case in Arizona. It seems like Kyrsten Sinema is going to pull off a victory there if the current count is the correct count. And that also could change. It's a southern story in America where diversity is helping Democrats. Democrats have edges with non-white candidates so so that's not really a surprise. But yeah let's talk a little bit more about Texas right because I do actually think that Beto is a special case. Right he visited all 254 counties in this state at the behest of strategists in Washington D.C. who said go visit every county. Kind of jokingly and then come talk to me and he did it in that special in a state where each county has a lot of diverse people in it. So the southern counties in the state are very nonwhite. The panhandle counties are much whiter, the Midland Odessa region where George Bush is from is very conservative very a product of the oil and gas interests of the state. It's the same thing in Houston but in Houston you also have Harris County right which is nonwhite which is much more liberal although not as blue as somewhere like San Francisco. And the demographic patterns in the district are sort of shaping the way that the political geography is taking shape in the state as well because of these reasons.

NICIE: And we saw some pretty exciting down ballot results in Texas even though Beto O'Rourke didn't quite get across the line judges, House seats. Some gains in the state legislature and so forth right.

MORRIS: Right. So the court that is seated in Dallas I think was either seven eight or nine members of it are now Democrats out of 13 which is the most that has been there I think since the realignment in Texas. That's a huge victory for Democrats. And then you also of course now you have the two congressional victories for Democrats here so Colin Allred in the 32nd district which is also Dallas and I believe SMU University and sort of the richer parts of Dallas and then also Texas's 7th District back to Houston where we were just talking about where Fletcher has defeated Culberson. Both of the two Republican incumbents that they beat are experienced politicians in Texas. So we shouldn't shrug off these victories. It's partially demographic realignment I think like I've just been talking about and also a strength again of Democratic candidates in the United States has propelled Democrats to victories that they would not have experienced otherwise.

NICIE: OK. And the other region we thought it would be worth touching base on is the so-called Rust Belt and the upper Midwest. A lot of the commentary since Tuesday has been looking forward to 2020 singling out this region as probably the critical region as we look forward to 2020 which we are now allowed to do. So what are your thoughts there?

MORRIS: I'm going to part ways with you as far as gauging impacts of 2020. I think it's a little too premature for that. Just for myself personally I don't think I have enough energy to go through that right now. But in the Midwest right. We did see a shift back towards Democrats. And I'm sounding a little hesitant here because it really depends on how you on what you're measuring Democrats performance now against the benchmark you're comparing them against. If you're comparing them against Hillary Clinton, it seems like the areas that swung harder towards Hillary Clinton are reverting back toward their like Obama-era partisanship and reverse is true as well. So the areas that swung towards Trump are also coming back towards the Democrats. We saw this especially in the suburban areas of the Midwest but it seems like the Democratic gains here were enough to give Democrats some key victories in congressional districts that they probably otherwise would not have had victories in. But that's not the entire story because Democrats fell short I think in a lot of districts in Ohio and in Indiana and although they had victories in Iowa and Michigan they didn't get any resounding good news in these other Rust Belt states I've mentioned. They fell short in West Virginia some people might say West Virginia's Southern but I think we're maybe a little outdated to call it that. Richard Ojeda losing in the third district I think is something that the forecasters expected but is certainly bad news for Democrats where they've been hoping to convert some old ancestral Democratic roots in the region. You know coal union ties to social memberships that are associated with Democrats didn't really help Democrats like I think they would have hoped.

NICIE: Yeah and fair enough. There's certainly a lot of hand wringing about Debbie Stabenow only winning by six. OK just a couple more topics before we before we close, systemic reforms. There were quite a number of ballot initiatives with respect to gerrymandering and other forms of expansion of the franchise. How are you feeling about those and what they portend do you think we'll see more of this this kind of activity to bring cleaner elections and more participation?

MORRIS: Well I'm a little reserved about wide politics online but I'll tell you all. Even as a center left member of the Democratic Party or just a center left ideologue I think that expanding the voting franchises normatively good in America even if I was ultra conservative or a right wing Republican like some of my family members I would think that it's better to give voting access to as many people as possible. To the extent that America has representative institutions again this is arguable given the Senate. It is good to have everyone to have a say in the process. In Florida you saw a big victory for this you know normative argument for American representation in the expansion of like you said the voting franchise to I think they call the returning citizens are just felons who have served out the entirety of their sentence. So prison probation and parole right. In the past they've had to go before arbitrary court and sort of argue their case and the reasons they are given for not being able to vote are extremely arbitrary and ridiculous right. So that's good. That's normatively good. And as someone who favors center left policies in America also great. We saw the reforming of the entire redistricting system that's going to prevent gerrymandering we hope in Michigan as well as in other states. This is good right. It's a victory for representation in America, when we allow more people to vote in the process when we make the processes by which their voices are heard fairer that's normatively good right there's no bad news here.

NICIE: And we'll provide a little shout out to another podcast today explained from Fox had a great episode about elections in Australia. They're not only a national holiday but voting is essentially required. There are people who come to you if you're in the hospital with your ballot and they have sausage sizzles at all the polling places.

MORRIS: So when you go to vote you get a barbecue? You get hot dogs.

NICIE: Correct.

MORRIS: I love that.

NICIE: They have lentil burgers for the vegetarians. So..

MORRIS: We should have that.

NICIE: Yeah. Okay good. The movement starts now.

MORRIS: I will be all in for barbequing to the polls right. I think that's a very good idea.

NICIE: That's because you're from Austin.

MORRIS: I'm a Texan so I would love to have brisket when I voted. I voted in the rain. You have to understand. I walked like across an urban jungle right to go vote this year it was rainy it was sad. I just cast my ballot. There were only five or six people to vote for here in Virginia. Most of the outcomes were predetermined right. If I was back in Texas and it was a hot day and I just want to barbecue after voting I think that'd be great.

NICIE: Couple of last things, on policy we have heard some say that with divided government the House will focused on investigations and the Senate will focus on nominations and not a whole hell else will get done. Would you agree with that outlook which seems rather grim?

MORRIS: As far as the House goes?

NICIE: Well the Congress probably won't move major legislation with the House being in Democratic hands.

MORRIS: Okay I was just trying to figure out if you were asking about a specific chamber. I think divided government is obviously a recipe for more gridlock. There was a time in American politics where moderate wings of both parties could come together and pass legislation. And I think we are almost certainly past that point now. I've seen some Democrats and liberals say maybe Trump will cooperate with Democrats on a trillion-dollar infrastructure spending bill but I really doubt that the president and a Senate that have shown themselves to be agents of partisanship would do that. Infrastructure spending is good. If your country needs infrastructure spending I would think that the United States needs to repair their crumbling bridges and roads. Right. But at the same time if you're a partisan in Washington it really doesn't look good to your donors especially but also to your voters to say that you reached across the aisle on something that raised the deficit by trillions of dollars perhaps.

NICIE: So you then Elliott are joining the chorus of experts that we have spoken to who do not see any relief in sight for our epidemic of hyper partisanship.

MORRIS: I certainly think that hyper partisanship is going to continue. Nothing about the midterms I think changes the longer term trends and polarization and in fact it might entrench them given that Democrats have had a taste of electoral victory again. Right. They might say that whatever they did this time in campaigning against Republican governance and campaigning against Donald Trump helped drive their voters to the polls. And if I'm a campaign manager and I just won an election because I campaigned against Donald Trump I would probably try to employ that strategy again. So if anything partisans will only be more entrenched from here on out I think.

NICIE: OK well the two moms are going on record saying we have some ideas about how we might combat it. You'll hear more about them in 2019.

HEATHER ATWOOD: I have a question that will take us away from all this gloom. I want to ask about the young people. Did come out for us and do we see evidence of that in any of these races?

MORRIS: So a have not taken a look at the polling on this. I only recently awoke from by post-election slumber but it does seem like what we thought before the election was true and that young people turned out at a higher rate for Democrats. And I think it will be a few weeks until we know the official turnout numbers for young people. Right. We typically get these from the Census Bureau surveys the CPS or the ACS. And I actually don't think that those will be available until December but don't quote me on that but it does seem like Democrats won a lot of young people and it seemed like young people were more energetic than they had been in the past. But who knows if those trends will persist.

NICIE: OK and finally what's next for you Elliott? What are the questions that most excite you? What are the data sets you want to get your hands on and how can our listeners follow your work?

MORRIS: Yeah well listeners can always follow me on Twitter. I swear I share all my work on my blog Thecrossedtab.com is still up and running although it's more of a showcase for the work I'm doing now rather than separate projects of election forecasting like they were for previous years. You know now that I have a full time job that's sort of where I put my full time effort. But I'm interested in the next these next few months about studying questions of polarization after the midterm elections and in late 2019 or early 2020 I think it will just restart this whole process over again. Right. That's the beauty of American elections.

NICIE: Elliott Morris thank you so much for your time today we really appreciate it.

MORRIS: Ok thank you all so much.

NICIE: Our thanks to Elliott Morris of The Economist magazine and our thanks to you our listeners. We know so many of you worked countless hours volunteering on campaigns, writing postcards, making calls and knocking doors. Thank you for your active citizenship. That's it for this week. Tune in next week with a deep dive into this year of the woman and the decades of research activism and support that made it possible. We'll speak with Amanda Hunter of the Barbara Lee Family Foundation. Thanks for listening. Thanks for voting. Thanks for being active citizens. And we'll see you next week.