e an election, it's never one thing. It's all of the things. Every one of the things had to be the way they were for him to get the result he did. If any of those things had been different, you would have lost. So is it sensible to say there's one thing? Not really, because it's sort of the haystack thing. It might be the last straw, but it's just one of the straws, right? Is the last straw the special one? No, it just came last. So there might be something that breaks the logjam there, but it's not special. There's nothing about that one straw.

So here are the things people are saying about Youngkin. Number one, it's just a historical pattern. I said this yesterday. It turns out that this is exactly the result you could have predicted based on historical pattern, that if you have a president from one party, Virginia will go to the other party. And eight times in a row it's happened. So that's one way.

The other, of course, is that the focus was on critical race theory. And of course Youngkin ran a good campaign, etc. And I think he did a good job of keeping some distance from Trump, and it helped that he didn't have any history as a politician. So those are all good. Again, you can't say there's one reason. It's all of those things had to happen.

But I would like to add another variable, just speculation. I have a hypothesis, and maybe somebody's, I haven't Googled this, maybe it's already been tested. But I feel as if I've seen a study where you can show people who don't know who the candidates are, could be some other country where you're not familiar with the candidates, that people can guess who would win the election by looking at their photographs. Did you know that? The public, and I need a fact check on this, but I read this a long time ago. I think that people can tell who's going to win an election by looking at the photographs, even without knowing the names of the candidates or what they're running for. Can somebody confirm that's true? I think that's true.

Now I would add a second factor. I would bet that, now I don't know if this is generalizable but probably it is, I'm just going to say it about myself. I believe that if you gave me audio clips of each candidate in a close race, so it'd have to be a race where you think that both have at least a chance of winning, not blowouts but in a close race, if you give me just the audio of each of their speeches for 10 to 15 seconds, it wouldn't matter what topic it was, 10 to 15 seconds of just hearing them talk, I can pick the winner. That's my claim. Now not every time of course, but I'll bet I could get it right 75 percent of the time plus. What do you think? Do you think I could get that right 75 percent of the time? I don't know.

But if you heard Obama talking and compared him to whoever he ran against, I think you could have picked him. And when I heard an audio of Youngkin talking compared to Terry McAuliffe talking, I said to myself, if this is close, Youngkin's going to