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A Watergate-Scale Rebuke To Trump

4 november 2026 · 19 min
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Well, that was quite an election night.

Democrats have won control of the House and Senate, making inroads into territory that would have seemed wildly out of reach two years ago. After seven hours of live coverage, Mary Radcliffe and Lenny Bronner join me for a late-night podcast to make sense of it all. We brought drinks and a few functioning brain cells.

We discuss the collapse in Republican turnout, a surge in Black turnout, Hispanic voters’ swing back toward Democrats, and why the wave hit some regions harder than others. A central question: How much of this result reflects voters changing their minds, and how much reflects who showed up? There’s still plenty of counting and analysis ahead, but the distinction matters for understanding what happened.

We also consider what Democrats’ sizable majorities could mean for Trump’s final two years, and why tonight’s results tell us less about 2028 than you might think.

Thanks to everyone who spent election night with us. We’ve got plenty more to talk about. First, some sleep.
Our Final Takes On The 2026 Election

2 november 2026 · 1 uur 7 min
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A note on our election-night plans: I’m teaming up with Silver Bulletin, The Argument and Slow Boring for a livestream and live blog at gdpolitics.com, starting at 5:30 p.m. Eastern. You’ll hear from many of your podcast favorites throughout the evening, including Nate Silver, Clare Malone, Nathaniel Rakich, Lakshya Jain and Lenny Bronner. Lees meer

The livestream will be open to everyone; the live blog will be for paid subscribers. That’s where you’ll find all of Nate’s hottest NSFW takes! I’ll send subscribers a reminder email when we’re live on election night. We’ll also have a late-night podcast for paid subscribers once we have enough results to draw some conclusions. It’s an exciting week ahead!

Happy election eve! Pollsters are releasing their final surveys, the forecasts are hours away from being frozen, and tens of millions of Americans have already voted. We’re about to find out whether all the pre-election data we’ve pored over actually painted an accurate picture of the 2026 electorate.

On this final pre-election episode of GD POLITICS, Mary Radcliffe and Lenny Bronner join me to assess the last-minute polls, answer your remaining questions, and register our final takes before the results come in.

A central question: Are Democrats’ surprisingly strong numbers in red states evidence of an unusually favorable electorate, or a warning that pollsters are struggling to reach Republican voters? We discuss what survey response rates can tell us and why weighting polls by voters’ recollections of 2024 introduces its own complications.

We also examine why this election might produce an uneven map. Candidate quality, regional differences, and shifting coalitions could mean very different results in states experiencing the same national political environment.

Finally, we offer three perspectives on the story that might emerge: Lenny explores how modest polling misses among particular groups could reshape the Senate outcome. Mary focuses on regional shifts and their im…
Your Hour-By-Hour Guide To Election Night

31 oktober 2026 · 18 min
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This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.gdpolitics.com Lees meer

A note on our election-night plans: I’m teaming up with Silver Bulletin, The Argument and Slow Boring for a livestream and live blog at gdpolitics.com, starting at 5:30 p.m. Eastern. You’ll hear from many of your podcast favorites throughout the evening, including Nate Silver, Clare Malone, Nathaniel Rakich, Lakshya Jain and Lenny Bronner.

The livestream will be open to everyone; the live blog will be for paid subscribers. That’s where you’ll find all of Nate’s hottest NSFW takes! I’ll send subscribers a reminder email when we’re live on election night. We’ll also have a late-night podcast for paid subscribers once we have enough results to draw some conclusions. It’s an exciting week ahead!

The full episode is available to paid subscribers. Once you become a paid subscriber, you can connect your account to your preferred podcast player here.

We’re just three days out from Election Day, and we’ve got another weekend bonus episode for you. When it rains, it pours, my friends.

Today, Nathaniel Rakich joins me for an hour-by-hour guide to Tuesday evening, from the first polls closing in Indiana and Kentucky to the long wait for Alaska. Which races will tell us whether we’re watching a blue tsunami or more of a ripple? How quickly does each state count its votes? And when will we know who won?

Florida could give us our first substantial answers. It counts quickly and has enough competitive House races to tell us something about the breadth of a Democratic wave. Texas and Kansas should also report relatively quickly, giving us a look at two of Democrats’ biggest Senate targets. Michigan and Maine will require more patience.

Nathaniel and I debate how early we’ll be able to tell who won the House. I’m inclined to stick my neck out; he brings his wet blanket (yes, I’m editorializing). The Senate could keep us waiting a week or more if control depends on Maine or Alaska. If either party…
Two Pollsters. Two Reads On The Wave.

29 oktober 2026 · 20 min
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Are you excited for Election Day? Well, get even more excited, because GD POLITICS is teaming up with Silver Bulletin and The Argument to bring you live election night coverage starting at 5:30 p.m. ET. There will be numbers, maps and probably an upset or two. Mark your calendars and join at gdpolitics.com!

The full episode is available to paid subscribers. Once you become a paid subscriber, you can connect your account to your preferred podcast player here.

We’re five days out, and the national environment looks rough for Republicans. The generic ballot sits at around D+9, and forecasters broadly agree that Democrats will take the House. The Senate is where the real argument lives, so that’s what I wanted to dig into on today’s episode with two pollsters who read the same data a little differently.

Patrick Ruffini, a Republican pollster and co-founder of Echelon Insights, sees the race for the Senate as a coin flip, with Texas as the potentially decisive pickup. His caution comes from the map and the track record: The median Senate battleground voted for Trump by about 12 points, and polling misses have clustered in red states and the Midwest, including Ohio and Iowa.

Lakshya Jain of Split Ticket and The Argument puts the median outcome at Democrats winning 52 Senate seats. His case: In a D+9 environment, Ohio plays like an even state, and Sherrod Brown and James Talarico tend to run ahead of the generic ballot.

Both expect Democrats’ biggest gains to come among Hispanic and Black voters, which favors the Sun Belt over the Midwest and prairie states. But both are skeptical of the late buzz about Mississippi and South Carolina.

We also get into what the early vote can actually tell us and whether this election is a test of the GOP’s multiracial working-class coalition. Patrick, who wrote the book on it, says a 70–30 Democratic split among Hispanic voters would put his thesis in …
BONUS: Talking Midterms With The Irish Times

28 oktober 2026 · 54 min
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Are you excited for Election Day? Well, get even more excited, because GD POLITICS is teaming up with Silver Bulletin and The Argument to bring you live election night coverage starting at 5:30 p.m. ET. There will be numbers, maps and probably an upset or two. Mark your calendars and join at gdpolitics.com! Lees meer

Earlier this year, while traveling in Ireland, I joined Hugh Linehan of The Irish Times for a crossover podcast comparing politics on either side of the Atlantic. With the midterms approaching, Hugh invited me back to Inside Politics to discuss the battle for Congress. I’m sharing that conversation as a bonus episode in the feed this week.

We covered plenty of ground. Hugh asked me how such a polarized country could potentially produce as large an electoral swing as the polls are showing. We talked about how the midterm and presidential electorates differ and which voters are likeliest to change their minds or sit out.

We also looked ahead: What will both parties learn from these elections? The temptation to read the midterms as a roadmap to the presidency is powerful. The historical relationship between midterm results and the next presidential election, though, looks less like a trend line than a Jackson Pollock painting.

Hope you enjoy the change of pace on today’s episode!

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.gdpolitics.com/subscribe
How Far Can Democrats Expand The Map?

26 oktober 2026 · 44 min
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We’re a week out from Election Day, nearly 30 million Americans have already voted, and Democrats are favored to win both chambers of Congress. But how far into Republican territory could a good night take them? Lees meer

We’ve dedicated episodes to Georgia, Texas and Alaska this cycle. So I asked folks in the paid subscriber chat which states they most wanted to hear about before November 3. The overwhelming preference was the prairie states: Iowa, Kansas and Nebraska. The Midwest came next, followed by requests for the reach states of Mississippi, Montana, Minnesota and South Carolina.

Sadly, we don’t have time for an episode on every state. Don’t you wish election season could go on forever? No? Me neither.

Instead, I’m joined by Jessica Taylor, the Senate and governors editor for the Cook Political Report, to cover all the races you asked about in one episode.

We start with the prairie states, where economic frustration and candidates who have distanced themselves from the Democratic Party are testing the limits of Republican loyalty. Can Rob Sand’s blend of faith, fiscal restraint and criticism of both parties win over Trump voters in Iowa? And can Adam Hamilton’s centrism in Kansas and Dan Osborn’s independent bid in Nebraska do the same?

Then we head to Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin to explore why the same national environment can produce very different races. We also consider where an upset is most plausible among the reach states and why Jessica is watching South Carolina.

Along the way, we discuss what early voting can actually tell us, whether split-ticket voting will hold up and what to make of Republicans spending money to defend states that once looked safe.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.gdpolitics.com/subscribe
BONUS: A Poll Hunter’s Guide to the Final Stretch

24 oktober 2026 · 18 min
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Heads up: Last call for our 2026 election season discount of 20% off for first-time subscribers. We’ve got a lot planned for the final stretch of the midterms and beyond. Come join us!

The full episode is available to paid subscribers. Once you become a paid subscriber, you can connect your account to your preferred podcast player here.

The polls are coming in hot. Some of them are even real 😬. With the election entering its final stretch, Mary Radcliffe and Lenny Bronner join me for a bonus episode of GD Politics to sort through the numbers and the headlines competing for your attention.

First, the state of the race. Democrats appear well positioned to win the House and are favored to win the Senate, with roughly a 75 percent chance of taking control. But how much confidence should we have in that picture? Mary explains why she’s watching rural voters, and we discuss signs in the data that the polls could be missing something.

Then we get to some polls with a more fundamental problem: whether they’re real. Mary has been investigating fake pollsters whose numbers have made their way into polling averages. She walks us through how she uncovered them and the drama that ensued.

We also consider the latest October surprises and the seasonal temptation to become an early voting analyst. This year’s early voting data comes with some new caveats.

Finally, we head abroad to discuss France’s political turmoil and Israel’s upcoming election, where opposition to Benjamin Netanyahu brings together parties with very different politics. We went long on this one because there’s plenty to talk about. Happy weekend to everyone spending theirs listening to a politics podcast. You’re in good company!
What Trump’s Voters Are Saying Now

22 oktober 2026 · 15 min
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Heads up: our 2026 election season discount is currently live! It’s 20% off paid subscriptions for first-time subscribers at gdpolitics.com. Join us for the final stretch of the midterms, election night and the aftermath — then it’s on to 2028! You’ll get Thursday episodes, virtual happy hours, merch discounts and access to our subscriber chat to ask questions and suggest topics. Join us!

The full episode is available to paid subscribers. Once you become a paid subscriber, you can connect your account to your preferred podcast player here.

What would it take for Donald Trump’s voters to give up on him? And if they did, would that mean giving Democrats a chance or just staying home?

With less than two weeks until the midterms, those questions are being put to the test. Trump is 23 percentage points underwater with the American public, and Democrats lead on the congressional generic ballot by nine points.

My guest today has spent the past eight years listening to voters explain why they support Trump, why they’ve turned against him, and sometimes why they’ve gone back. Sarah Longwell is a former Republican, publisher of The Bulwark, and host of The Focus Group. Her new book, How to Eat an Elephant: One Voter at a Time, argues that it’s possible to build a coalition that defeats Trump’s style of politics for good.

That’s a bigger ambition than winning a midterm. So we examine what would have to change to make it happen and whether the dissatisfaction Longwell hears from Trump voters could translate into lasting support for Democrats.

We also discuss how today’s swing voters have changed and when better messaging can help versus when voters simply don’t like a party’s policies. Finally, Longwell weighs in on the 2028 Democratic presidential field, including the picks from our recent candidate draft over at Still Counting.
Will The Midterms Be Free And Fair?

19 oktober 2026 · 54 min
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Heads up: our 2026 election season discount is currently live! It’s 20% off paid subscriptions for first-time subscribers at gdpolitics.com. Join us for the final stretch of the midterms, election night and the aftermath — then it’s on to 2028! You’ll get Thursday episodes, virtual happy hours, merch discounts and access to our subscriber chat to ask questions and suggest topics. Join us! Lees meer

Since President Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election, there’s been an extra question hanging over American elections. Not just who will win, but whether the will of the voters will be respected.

With roughly two weeks until Election Day, I wanted to sort through the concerns surrounding the midterms and distinguish the plausible threats from the more farfetched scenarios. So today, Votebeat managing editor and friend of the pod Nathaniel Rakich joins me to walk through what could go wrong before, during and after the election.

First, a brief soapbox moment: Republican and Democratic GDers are equally welcome here. Disagreeing about how the country should be governed is why we have elections. But respecting the results once we’ve settled on the rules is a prerequisite for that disagreement to mean anything. And so this is an area of coverage where we don’t really mess around.

That said, Nathaniel’s assessment is somewhat reassuring. In Votebeat’s informal survey of 31 election experts, respondents generally expected challenges to the election, but did not expect those challenges to overturn the results. That still leaves plenty of room for damage.

We discuss bureaucratic errors, the strain on local election offices, the difference between routine poll monitoring and intimidation, and the possibility of federal interference in counting ballots.

The biggest variable in Nathaniel’s outlook is also a familiar one: the margin. A decisive result leaves much less room for mischief. A razor-thin race that determines control of the Senate, with ballots still being counted day…
Inside The Fight For The House

15 oktober 2026 · 19 min
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Heads up: The GD POLITICS merch store is back for election season! We’ve got super comfy “Good Data, Bad Data, Not Data” T-shirts, baseball caps, and totes. Paid subscribers can find a discount code in the paid-subscriber chat!

The full episode is available to paid subscribers. Once you become a paid subscriber, you can connect your account to your preferred podcast player here.

Democrats need to gain just three seats to take control of the House. But with a favorable national environment opening up opportunities in Republican territory, the bigger question is probably how far they can go and what might limit their gains.

On today’s episode, Cook Political Report’s Erin Covey and Inside Elections’ Jacob Rubashkin join me to tour the House battlefield. They explain what district-level polling reveals about the election, why some traditionally Republican areas are seeing particularly large shifts toward Democrats, and how campaign spending is keeping vulnerable Republicans competitive.

We also debate whether individual candidates can still overcome their party’s political fortunes. From Republican Brian Fitzpatrick’s durability in Pennsylvania to Democrat Jamie Ager’s campaign in western North Carolina, local reputations and issues offer a more complicated picture than national polling alone can provide.

Erin and Jacob also dive into the differences between expert race ratings and statistical forecasts, the campaign messages dominating the airwaves, and the lasting consequences of gerrymandering. And they consider what the size of a Democratic majority would mean for Hakeem Jeffries and governance during the final two years of Trump’s presidency.
Alex Bores Puts The Odds Of AI Doom At 20%

12 oktober 2026 · 57 min
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If you thought there was a 20 percent chance that artificial intelligence could wipe out humanity, what would you do about it? That’s my guest’s estimate of the risk if we continue on our current trajectory with AI. And he’s trying to write the laws that could change it. Lees meer

Alex Bores is a Democratic New York State assemblyman and the sponsor of the RAISE Act, which requires major AI developers to publish safety plans and report certain critical incidents. He’s also the co-founder of Who Decides, an organization working to shape Democrats’ AI agenda ahead of 2028.

On today’s podcast, we discuss what taking these risks seriously actually means. Should the government have to approve AI models before they’re released to the public? Should we pause the development of more powerful AI altogether? And what happens if slowing down rattles the economy or gives China a leg up?

I also press him on why New York Governor Kathy Hochul moved to water down his AI legislation, and what that experience tells us about the obstacles to regulating AI more broadly.

And we get into partisan politics. If Democratic and Republican voters share many concerns about AI, could making it a partisan issue be counterproductive? And either way, how might AI reshape the politics of 2028?

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.gdpolitics.com/subscribe
The Fight For The Right After Trump

8 oktober 2026 · 26 min
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Heads up: The GD POLITICS merch store is back for election season! We’ve got super comfy “Good Data, Bad Data, Not Data” T-shirts, baseball caps, and totes. Paid subscribers can find a discount code in the paid-subscriber chat!

The full episode is available to paid subscribers. Once you become a paid subscriber, you can connect your account to your preferred podcast player here.

Fights between the Left and the Democratic establishment have been front and center this election cycle, but it’d be a mistake to conclude that it’s mainly Democrats whose looks like a question mark.

Trump has kept an often discordant coalition together through force of personality, but time is running out on that dynamic. He’s term-limited and 20 points underwater with the American public. And his decisions on everything from Iran and the Epstein files to tariffs and AI have created cracks that threaten to break wide open.

JD Vance is the heir apparent, but without Trump, will he be able to keep it all together? And beyond a personal brand, is there a worldview that can unite Republicans?

Before Trump, there was the three-legged stool of free markets, traditional values, and national security hawkishness. In the Trump era, philosophies like America First, national conservatism, and common good conservatism have been bandied about under the umbrella of the “New Right.”

Amid it all, it seems like there’s no going back to the principles that guided the GOP during the second half of the 20th century. But if not those principles, then what? And how fierce will the fight be?

That’s what I’m talking about today with Stephanie Slade, a senior editor at the libertarian magazine Reason and the author of the new book Fusionism: Liberty, Virtue, and the Future of the American Right.
Your Midterms Questions, Debated Over Drinks

7 oktober 2026 · 18 min
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The full episode is available to paid subscribers. Once you become a paid subscriber, you can connect your account to your preferred podcast player here.

What’s the next swing state: Texas, Kansas or Minnesota? And how much should we trust the polls pointing toward a big blue wave this November?

Mary Radcliffe and Nathaniel Rakich joined me for our first GD POLITICS paid-sunscriber happy hour to debate the changing electoral map and answer your questions about the midterms. We covered everything from the Senate battlegrounds, to whether campaign ads can backfire, and when we might know who controls Congress.

We also took a few detours into bourbon spreadsheets, Brené Brown, politician crushes and life after FiveThirtyEight. It was a lot of fun catching up with friends and spending the evening with you all!
What Do America’s Socialists Want?

5 oktober 2026 · 50 min
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Heads up: We’re hosting our first-ever virtual happy hour for paid subscribers on Tuesday, October 6, at 8 p.m. ET at gdpolitics.com. Special guests Mary Radcliffe and Nathaniel Rakich will join me to answer your questions live while we sip an adult beverage or two. To join the fun, become a paid subscriber here. I look forward to seeing you there! Lees meer

Today, we’re talking about socialism. Democrats are heading into the 2026 midterms after a “hot socialist summer,” in which Democratic Socialists and DSA-aligned candidates had their best primary season since Bernie Sanders popularized the organization in 2016.

There are two DSA members in the House today: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib. At the start of the next Congress, there could be seven.

They’ve also won state and local primaries. And there are roughly a dozen other candidates — including Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, Troy Jackson in Maine, and Brad Lander in New York — who are not Democratic Socialists in name but are strongly aligned with the movement.

It’s not quite the 45 Tea Party-backed congressional candidates who won in the 2010 midterms, but the dynamic isn’t so different: An insurgent ideological movement, fed up with the status quo, is challenging the powers that be in one of America’s two major parties.

So where did the movement come from? What does it want? And can it coexist with the rest of the Democratic Party, or is it seeking a MAGA-style takeover?

In this episode, I dig into these questions and more with Charles Homans, a national politics reporter for The New York Times Magazine. He recently reported the article “Moderates See Socialists as a Threat to the Democratic Party. Socialists Agree,” for which he spoke with DSA candidates, organizers, and members in New York, Chicago, Michigan, and Wisconsin.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.gdpolitics.com/subscribe
Why Alaska Is 2026’s Most Unusual Battleground

1 oktober 2026 · 21 min
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This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.gdpolitics.com Lees meer

Heads up: We’re hosting our first-ever virtual happy hour for paid subscribers on Tuesday, October 6, at 8 p.m. ET at gdpolitics.com. Special guests Mary Radcliffe and Nathaniel Rakich will join me to answer your questions live while we sip an adult beverage or two. To join the fun, become a paid subscriber here.

Make sure to mark your calendar. I look forward to seeing you there!

The full episode is available to paid subscribers. Once you become a paid subscriber, you can connect your account to your preferred podcast player here.

Today we’re zooming in on another 2026 battleground state, and this time, fittingly, it’s Alaska. There’s a lot more to this fall’s elections than Mary Peltola’s profanity!

Donald Trump won Alaska by 13 points in 2024. But two years later, Democrats are mounting serious challenges at the top of the ticket.

In the Senate race, Peltola leads Republican incumbent Dan Sullivan by 2.5 points in the polling averages, and Silver Bulletin gives her a 55 percent chance of winning. Their contest is unfolding amid sky-high energy costs, dissatisfaction with the Trump administration, and a fierce debate over Alaska’s fisheries.

The governor’s race is particularly unusual. Candidates are competing to replace term-limited Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy, and while sparse polling and ranked-choice voting make the race difficult to measure, Silver Bulletin gives Democrat Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins an 86 percent chance of winning. It would be the first time since 1998 that Alaska elected a Democratic governor. Kreiss-Tomkins is aided by a fractured Republican field and a ranked-choice voting system that voters may repeal this fall.

Meanwhile, Republican Nick Begich has a 90 percent chance of holding Alaska’s lone House seat, suggesting very divergent preferences across three statewide races.

But we’re not just talking about the horse race. Alaska’s political culture does…
If The Polls Are Wrong, This Is Why

28 september 2026 · 45 min
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Heads up: We’re hosting our first-ever virtual happy hour for paid subscribers on Tuesday, October 6, at 8 p.m. ET at gdpolitics.com. Special guests Mary Radcliffe and Nathaniel Rakich will join me to answer your questions live while we sip an adult beverage or two. To join the fun, become a paid subscriber here. Lees meer

Make sure to mark your calendar. I look forward to seeing you there!

Today we have a sneak preview for you all. Dear listeners, you are the first to hear the results of friend of the pod Lakshya Jain’s latest polling for The Argument.

Democrats lead by 6 points among registered voters and 9 points among likely voters. That advantage is broadly in line with the polling averages and, if accurate, would amount to a wave on par with the 2006 election.

Lakshya estimates that roughly 70 percent of Democrats’ gains come from voters switching their support between 2024 and 2026, while 30 percent come from turnout — Trump voters staying home as Harris voters continue to show up.

That raises the question nagging pollsters and election watchers alike: If the polls are wrong this cycle, where are they going astray?

Lakshya’s biggest concern is that Trump voters who answer polls may be more willing to defect than otherwise similar Trump voters who don’t respond. That kind of nonresponse bias can’t necessarily be corrected by weighting a poll to reflect the right demographic or partisan mix. It could be particularly consequential in states with large populations of white voters without college degrees, such as Iowa and Ohio.

We also dig into the issues shaping the election. The economy remains voters’ top concern, but corruption now slightly outranks immigration. And The Argument’s foreign policy polling finds an electorate deeply skeptical of military intervention, with the war in Iran even less popular than the war in Iraq.

Joining me to talk about all that and much more is Lakshya Jain, head of political data at The Argument and founder of Split Ticket.

This…
Peltola Unfiltered, Polls Galore, And The Likeliest Senate Flips

24 september 2026 · 21 min
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The full episode is available to paid subscribers. Once you become a paid subscriber, you can connect your account to your preferred podcast player here.

We have so much to get to on today’s episode!

We are long overdue to answer your burning electoral questions. You wanted to know about the state of the Senate race in South Carolina, whether President Trump’s approval rating has reached its floor, whether candidates are debating less, and much more.

We’re also going to do something we haven’t done in a minute: rank the competitive Senate seats by how likely they are to flip in November. To help with that endeavor, we just got new statewide polling from The New York Times in Maine, Michigan, and New Hampshire. We’ll size up the polls showing Susan Collins ahead in Maine and Abdul El-Sayed ahead in Michigan.

That probably would have been enough for one episode, but on Wednesday night, The New York Times published a report about Mary Peltola’s alleged behind-the-scenes behavior on the campaign trail and in her congressional office. TL;DR: The report says she makes really b****y comments in private despite her affable public persona. The more serious allegation is that she shoved a staffer, which her campaign disputes.

Joining me to discuss it all are Mary Radcliffe, head of research at FiftyPlusOne, and Lenny Bronner, head of the data outfit Broome Street Labs.

For those who want a visual aid during our Senate-seat flippability ranking segment, I’m dropping Mary and Lenny’s rankings below the paywall:
Is This Time Different In Texas?

21 september 2026 · 58 min
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Today we’re zooming in on the midterm races in Texas. We started our 2026 tour of the states in Georgia. If you haven’t listened to that episode yet, go check it out! Lees meer

If Georgia has become a secondary concern for the parties this cycle, it’s because redder states have upstaged it and Texas is the star of the whole show.

In the race for Senate, Democrat James Talarico and Republican Ken Paxton aren’t just making Texas look like a highly competitive state. They’re making it look like Democrats are favored. Talarico currently leads in the polling averages by three points, and Paxton hasn’t led in the average since the conclusion of the primary in May.

In the race for governor, Republican Greg Abbott is favored and leads Democrat Gina Hinojosa by three points on average, though it’s certainly a closer race than Republicans would have imagined two years ago, when Trump won the state by 14 points and Abbott was sitting at a net approval rating of plus 20 percentage points.

In the House, Texas steals the show again. It was ground zero for the redistricting wars, with Republicans redrawing the map to give themselves five pickup opportunities. That now looks overly optimistic.

Even downballot races are attracting national attention. The Republican nominee for railroad commissioner, Bo French, prompted Karl Rove to endorse his Democratic opponent after his racist posts on Twitter, bemoaning the presence of South Asian students celebrating at a UT Austin Longhorns game.

With me to talk about it all are Gabby Birenbaum, Washington correspondent for The Texas Tribune, and James Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project at UT Austin, where he directs the project’s polling.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.gdpolitics.com/subscribe
Georgia’s 2026 Election Is Already About 2028

17 september 2026 · 12 min
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The full episode is available to paid subscribers. Once you become a paid subscriber, you can connect your account to your preferred podcast player here.

As Election Day approaches, we’re zooming in on some of the states shaping this cycle with the reporters who know them best. First up: Georgia. The Senate race has slipped somewhat from the national spotlight, but there’s still plenty of action in the races for governor and the state House.

Jon Ossoff began the cycle as the only Democratic senator seeking reelection in a state Trump won in 2024. He now leads Republican Mike Collins in current polling averages, while Collins’s campaign has faced an ethics investigation and other controversies. We look at how the race got here and why Ossoff’s growing national profile has stirred talk about 2028, even though he says he isn’t running.

Then there’s the governor’s race, which pits former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms against Republican healthcare executive Rick Jackson. Bottoms is emphasizing affordability and her Georgia roots, while Jackson is presenting himself as a political outsider after spending more than $108 million of his own money during the primary.

There’s plenty happening down the ballot, too. Democrats hope to flip the state House, while the fight over Georgia’s political maps is far from settled. Republican leaders shelved a redistricting push this summer, but Democrats warn that it could return after the election.

To sort through it all, I’m joined by the hosts of the Politically Georgia podcast: Tia Mitchell, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Washington bureau chief, and Greg Bluestein, the newspaper’s chief political reporter.
The AI Apocalypse Comes To Washington

14 september 2026 · 53 min
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A dam of pent-up concern over AI safety burst this past week. It started with a warning from AI researcher Jacob Coxon, who resigned from Anthropic and wrote on X: “Do not underestimate the power of this technology. These will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources.” Lees meer

He continued: “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”

Since then, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has outlined a plan to slow the technology’s development and give safety measures time to catch up. He also warned that, within six months to a year, swarms of AI agents could take over the entire internet. Sam Altman and Elon Musk both expressed support for Amodei’s warning and proposed approach.

Politicians are also taking notice and calling for regulation. The most forceful proposals have come from Democrats, though not exclusively. Sens. John Thune, Amy Klobuchar and Ted Cruz are reportedly working on AI-safety legislation that could be introduced as soon as this week.

Bernie Sanders has called on President Trump to pursue an AI agreement with China modeled on the nuclear arms agreements reached by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. At a fundraiser, former President Barack Obama urged Democrats to “aggressively develop political and governing agendas to prioritize the issue in the coming years,” according to The New York Times.

For his part, Trump wrote Monday on Truth Social: “The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT.” He continued: “There is a SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers, and the only one that is happy about it is China. WHOEVER WINS AI, WINS!”

Joining me today to discuss whether AI is going to kill us all — or, at the very least, how the threat that it could is ricocheting through American politics — are two sharp thinkers on AI. David Byler is a pollster and vice president at National R…
‘Still Counting’ After All These Years

10 september 2026 · 23 min
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As you’ve likely heard, Nate Silver, Clare Malone and I have a new podcast going over at Crooked Media called Still Counting. We released our first official episode on Wednesday, and that is what you’re going to hear in the feed today.

(It’s this thing we do in the podcasting world called a “feed drop.” The hope is that you will like what you hear and subscribe to the new podcast. So please, dear listener, go subscribe!)

To pull the curtain back a little, starting this new podcast is something Nate, Clare and I have been talking about doing since around February or March of this year. We really enjoyed taping live shows at the Comedy Cellar, and audience members would frequently ask us after the shows if we’d consider getting back together.

We all have our own projects going – Clare at the New Yorker, Nate at Silver Bulletin, and me here at GD – but the stars aligned just so that it felt like reassembling the band made sense.

We got to work reaching out to different podcast shops that we thought might be interested in a FiveThirtyEight sequel, and we had a lot of conversations. One of the things that attracted us to Crooked was that they were familiar with FiveThirtyEight, knew what we were about, and wanted to let us do our thing. That included not aligning with a political party.

We set a goal to launch as election season was picking up after Labor Day, and voilà, here we are.

In this first episode, we dive into the most competitive Senate races in the midterms according to the polls: Texas, Michigan, Iowa, Maine, Alaska, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Kansas, and Ohio. We also weigh whether the Republican midterm convention is a “good use of convention or a bad use of convention.” And, on a more somber note, we take stock of the year in American politics since Charlie Kirk’s assassination.

It was nice to get the crew back together, and we’re still just getting warmed up. So,…
How Far Can The Redistricting Arms Race Go?

7 september 2026 · 46 min
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Quick note: The mid-decade redistricting wars have been so chaotic that the maps changed again between when I recorded this podcast on Thursday and when you’re hearing it. Lees meer

Hours after I spoke with Dave Wasserman of the Cook Political Report, the Missouri Supreme Court blocked Republicans’ new congressional map from being used this November and ordered the state to move forward with a referendum on it. Missouri is appealing to the U.S. Supreme Court, but if the decision stands, Republicans will have one fewer potential pickup from redistricting this cycle. Consider that an asterisk on some of the numbers you’ll hear in this episode.

The bigger story remains the same: The fight over congressional maps has transformed the battle for the House. Ten states have redrawn their maps since 2024, and according to Cook’s Partisan Voter Index, the median House district has moved from roughly one point more Republican than the country to about three points more Republican.

At the same time, competitive districts are disappearing. In 2000, 164 House districts fell between R+5 and D+5 in Cook’s PVI. Today, Wasserman says there are just 78 — fewer than one in five House districts. And the redistricting wars aren’t necessarily over. Both parties could still try to squeeze additional seats out of states they control in the years ahead.

Dave and I first dug into gerrymandering together nearly a decade ago for FiveThirtyEight’s Gerrymandering Project. Back then, redistricting was largely something that happened once every ten years. As Dave puts it today, we’ve gone from redistricting every ten years to what feels like “every 10 seconds.”

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You Can’t Poll Away Uncertainty

3 september 2026 · 18 min
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We are exactly two months away from Election Day and just days away from the official start of election season. It’s going to be two months of new polls, forecast gyrations and, in a word, uncertainty.

At this point in an election cycle, back at FiveThirtyEight, I’d sometimes feel that a therapist might be better suited to hosting the podcast, because the job became, to some extent, helping people reckon with the unknown.

One way we did that was by trying to quantify uncertainty and put it in historical context — looking at, for example, the average error or the largest error in past elections. And I think that’s plenty useful.

But after more than a decade in the data journalism trenches, I can tell you that numbers will soothe the soul only so much. At a certain point, we just have to get comfortable with not knowing.

And that’s what we’re doing on today’s podcast, in the final calm before the storm. My guest is journalist Simone Stolzoff, author of How to Not Know: The Value of Uncertainty in a World That Demands Answers.
This Is What A Blue Wave Looks Like

31 augustus 2026 · 44 min
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We’re a week away from the official start of election season — Labor Day — but the polls are not waiting. New Senate surveys in Texas, Michigan and Iowa are sharpening the picture of the battle for Congress. And polls from South Carolina, Nebraska and Kansas have made Democrats optimistic about competitive races on decidedly red turf. Lees meer

So is this silly season, when Democrats get their hopes up in states they won’t actually win? Or is a blue wave putting much more of the map in play? Lakshya Jain, founder of Split Ticket and head of political data at The Argument, and Zach Donnini, head of data science at VoteHub, join today’s episode to sort through the evidence.

We discuss why Texas looks different from Democrats’ previous attempts to turn it blue, how much candidate quality could matter in Michigan, and why a favorable national environment likely isn’t enough for Democrats in South Carolina.

We also check in on Zach and Lakshya’s forecasts and the Democratic primary between Ed Markey and Seth Moulton in Massachusetts. (Yes, we are still talking about primaries. Those don’t wrap up until mid-September!)

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Are Data Centers The ‘Sleeper Issue’ Of 2026?

27 augustus 2026 · 19 min
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I want to give listeners a heads-up about some exciting news: Nate Silver, Clare Malone, and I are starting a weekly podcast with Crooked Media called Still Counting! We’re getting the gang back together every Wednesday to talk politics and numbers starting September 9, and you can subscribe now on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. There’s already a trailer in the feed to give you a taste of what’s to come.

To be clear, GD POLITICS isn’t going anywhere. I’ve loved making this podcast for you all over the past year and a half, and I’ll continue chatting with friends, experts, authors, and others every Monday and Thursday. Now you can also hear from Clare, Nate, and me on Wednesdays!

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We’ve been talking for a while on this podcast about how AI is liable to disrupt American politics, whether through joblessness or a bursting stock market bubble. We’re not ruling any of those out, but the most immediate disruption appears to be data centers.

According to a recent Fox News poll, American voters oppose building a data center in their area to support artificial intelligence technology by 40 percentage points.

Politicians are taking note. Both Democrats and Republicans who championed new data centers in their states just last year have since taken sharp turns on the issue.

Last week, the Senate GOP campaign arm released a memo warning that the issue could sink Ohio Senator Jon Husted, writing, “If he loses and data centers get the blame, politicians across the country will take notice — and they will not go near the next one.” The memo goes on to say, “This has become a sleeper issue for the entire election cycle.”

Today, Mary Radcliffe, head of research at FiftyPlusOne, and Nathaniel Rakich, managing editor at Votebeat…
Millennials Are Taking Over American Politics

24 augustus 2026 · 48 min
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Today’s podcast is about the youth. And when I say youth, I am being generous. What I really mean is millennials, a group that today stretches from the sprightly age of 30 to the ripe old age of 45. (We also talk about Gen Z, but that’s a group that still hasn’t come into its own politically and economically. The youngest Gen Zers are still five years away from the voting booth.) Lees meer

But millennials are here. They run the largest AI companies in the world, sit in seats of power from Congress to the vice presidency, and are increasingly reshaping American politics in their image.

If you’ve followed Democrats’ mini-summer of discontent, you’ve noticed that, at least within the Democratic Party, they are much more progressive than their elders and more likely to back insurgent candidates who pitch wholesale change.

Though it’s a group that leans left, the young right is also different. They’ve ditched Fox for podcasters, care more about cancel culture than traditional values like same-sex marriage or abortion, and share a skepticism of the status quo with their left counterparts.

In talking about the youth, or the younger half of the country (the median American is 40), we try to get a better sense of this moment in politics and where the ascendant generations are taking us next. We touch on recent intraparty fights and dive into the new political tribes that describe our divisions.

Joining me on this episode is Kristen Soltis Anderson, a Republican pollster and co-founder of Echelon Insights. She also writes the newsletter Type A- and is the author of the book The Selfie Vote: Where Millennials Are Leading America (And How Republicans Can Keep Up).

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Could Texas Tip The Senate?

20 augustus 2026 · 22 min
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On today’s podcast, we tour the seven states most likely to decide control of the Senate with Silver Bulletin Senior Elections Analyst Eli McKown-Dawson. At the top of the list is… Texas. Silver Bulletin’s forecast currently gives Democrat James Talarico a 59 percent chance of defeating Republican Ken Paxton. We unpack what the model sees in Texas, Ohio, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, Alaska and North Carolina—and why candidate quality produces some eye-popping results.

If you’re skeptical of those numbers, we also examine evidence that summer Senate polls have historically overstated Democrats’ eventual performance. Is today’s favorable polling simply another midsummer mirage? Eli explains how the forecast accounts for early polling uncertainty and why presidential year misses don’t necessarily tell us what to expect in a midterm.

We also recap Tuesday’s primaries in Florida, Alaska and Wyoming. Democratic socialist Angie Nixon defeated the much better-funded Alex Vindman in Florida’s Senate primary, three Trump-endorsed candidates lost and two pro-Israel moderate Democrats won decisively in South Florida. Meanwhile, Alaska voters may get to choose between not one but two Republican Senate candidates named Dan Sullivan.

Finally, a purported polling firm released numbers in the Wisconsin gubernatorial primary and Los Angeles mayoral race, then admitted the polls were fake and called the whole thing a “short-term social experiment.” Are we buying that explanation, or did they simply get caught? We discuss how election analysts vet new pollsters and keep fake, amateur and AI-generated polling out of their averages.
The Latino Vote Is Up For Grabs

17 augustus 2026 · 51 min
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During the decade that Donald Trump has dominated American politics, no major part of the electorate has changed as dramatically as Latino voters. Lees meer

According to Pew’s validated voter data, Democrats’ advantage among Latinos fell from 38 percentage points in 2016 to just 3 points in 2024. Other sources show smaller swings, but the conclusion is the same: The rightward movement among Latino voters was larger than the shift within any other major group defined by age, race, gender or education.

That transformation overturned much of the conventional wisdom formed during the Obama years. Latinos could no longer be treated as a reliably Democratic constituency, nor could immigration be assumed to determine their votes.

On this episode, I spoke with Carlos Odio, co-founder of Equis Research and author of the new Substack The New Dynamic, about what changed and what both parties still misunderstand.

Carlos argues that the shift was not simply a reaction to one campaign, candidate or message. Trump benefited from broader class and cultural divides reshaping electorates across Western democracies. Latino voters were subject to many of the same forces pulling other working-class voters to the right, but their long-standing Democratic allegiance delayed the movement.

Immigration matters, but it’s not the most important issue. Carlos also distinguishes between attitudes toward immigrants already established in the country and attitudes toward people seeking to enter. Latino voters can support a pathway to citizenship for longtime residents while also favoring stricter control of the border. In 2024, the latter concern dominated.

Democrats have since regained some ground, but Carlos cautions against overinterpreting low-turnout elections. Republicans probably now have a higher floor among Latinos than they did before Trump. At the same time, many Latino voters remain genuinely persuadable and traditional campaign models often fail to identify them.

Neither party has a loc…
Nate Silver’s Forecast Is Bullish On Democrats

13 augustus 2026 · 19 min
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Friend of the pod Nate Silver launched his midterm forecast this week, which means it is officially “Who is going to win?!” season. Buckle up!

It’s also the time of year when I get to pester Nate with questions about his model, such as: What’s going on in Texas? How much do fundamentals matter? And should a forecast take betting markets into account?

On this episode, Nate and I went live on Substack to talk about it all. He explains why the generic ballot, President Trump’s approval rating, recent election results and fundraising data point to a favorable environment for Democrats. We also look at what that could mean for key races in Texas, Alaska and Michigan.

Then we dig into the big polling miss in Wisconsin’s Democratic gubernatorial primary and ask whether it suggests that general-election polls could be headed for a similar failure this fall.

Finally, we weigh how much candidate quality and scandals still matter and why uncertainty is more predictable in some elections than in others.
Will Wisconsin Elect A Democratic Socialist?

10 augustus 2026 · 57 min
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In case one progressive-versus-moderate swing-state showdown wasn’t enough, Wisconsin is running it back this week with its Democratic gubernatorial primary. Lees meer

Democratic Socialist state legislator Francesca Hong has led the pack for much of the race, but the leading non-socialist alternative has shifted as candidates have dropped out and one even got back in. In the final stretch, that alternative has been Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, who dropped out on July 8 and reentered the race just 10 days later.

Hong has attracted plenty of attention for radical statements she has made over the years, and Wisconsin’s Democratic establishment is working to prevent her from advancing to the general election against Republican Rep. Tom Tiffany. So far, every poll has shown Hong leading, but given the recent chaos in the primary and last week’s polling miss in Michigan, a significant polling error doesn’t seem out of the realm of possibility.

To make sense of the race, I’m joined by two of Wisconsin’s leading political observers: Charles Franklin, director of the Marquette Law Poll, and Craig Gilbert, a Lubar Center fellow at Marquette Law School and a longtime Milwaukee Journal Sentinel journalist.

We examine the reliability of the primary polling, Hong’s rise, the Democratic Party’s ideological evolution and the electability arguments shaping the race. We also explore the broader political mood in the country’s quintessential swing state and what Marquette’s state and national polling reveals about the road to November.

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El-Sayed Won. The Polls Did Not.

5 augustus 2026 · 21 min
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Abdul El-Sayed has officially won Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary, but by nothing like the margin the polls suggested.

El-Sayed led Haley Stevens by about 13 points in the polling averages. Instead, he won by about one percentage point after Stevens outperformed expectations, particularly in rural Michigan.

That’s partly a reminder that primaries are uncertain and open primaries are especially difficult to poll, but it also highlights a tension within the Democratic Party: El-Sayed campaigned as a champion of working people while finding his greatest strength among younger, college-educated progressives. Stevens performed better with many of the rural and working-class voters Democrats say they need to win back.

On today’s episode, Mary Radcliffe and Nathaniel Rakich joined me to sort through the results in Michigan and debate what they mean for the general election. We also assessed results across the country.

Voters in Missouri overwhelmingly rejected a Republican-backed amendment that would have made citizen-led constitutional amendments nearly impossible to pass. Missouri Rep. Wesley Bell also easily defeated former Rep. Cori Bush’s comeback bid, giving the Democratic establishment a clear win.

In Washington, moderate Democratic Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez advanced from the top-two primary in a Trump-won district that has recently moved left. And in Kansas, voters rejected a Republican-backed effort to require state Supreme Court justices to be chosen by popular vote. The state’s primaries also put data centers and the growing backlash to their effects on local communities in the spotlight.
Scandal, Insurgents, And Big Money

3 augustus 2026 · 1 uur
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A heads-up: We’ll be covering this week’s primaries live starting at 8 p.m. ET on Tuesday at gdpolitics.com Lees meer

Ohio Republican Rep. Max Miller is under pressure to step aside after new details about allegations of abuse emerged from his divorce and custody case. Miller denies the allegations and says he will stay in the race. His former father-in-law, Republican Sen. Bernie Moreno, says Miller should not be serving in Congress.

On today’s episode, Inside Elections’ Jacob Rubashkin joins me to discuss what this means for Miller’s political future and what new polling tells us about how voters in both parties respond when a candidate faces a scandal.

Then, the blockbuster Democratic Senate primary of late summer is here. Haley Stevens and Abdul El-Sayed face off in Michigan on Tuesday. The polls don’t show a particularly close race — El-Sayed leads by 13 points on average — but primaries can be unpredictable. No matter the outcome, the results will tell us plenty about what Democratic primary voters are looking for and how far money goes in politics.

Michigan isn’t the only state holding important elections this week. Both parties have competitive primaries to replace Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly, a term-limited Democrat. We also look at Cori Bush’s comeback bid in Missouri and a ballot measure there that could make it much harder for voters to amend the state Constitution.

Lastly, we’re one week away from the end of Wisconsin’s chaotic Democratic primary for governor. The race has featured several scandal-plagued dropouts, one candidate dropping out and then jumping back in, last-minute endorsements and a democratic socialist leading the pack.

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We Drafted The Perfect Primary Calendar

30 juli 2026 · 24 min
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The way Americans choose their presidential nominees is largely an accident of history.

Some states began holding more open primaries during the Progressive Era in the early 20th century, but the nominating process was substantially democratized after the disastrous 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

No one set out to give Iowa and New Hampshire so much influence. But after the process opened up, and Jimmy Carter propelled his campaign by camping out in Iowa ahead of the 1976 caucuses, building momentum in the early states became essential to winning a presidential nomination.

The result is a system that some consider nonsensical, or at least unfair. Why give so much power to a handful of states? Why not have everyone vote at the same time, or have groups of states vote together? And what is so bad about letting party conventions choose the nominees in the first place? That would be closer to how political parties in most other democracies select their candidates.

In 2028, the process is getting shaken up again, just not in any of those ways. The early states will retain their outsized influence, but Democrats are reshuffling which states receive the privilege.

Under a newly proposed Democratic National Committee calendar, six states would vote before Super Tuesday, the earliest date on which any other state would be allowed to hold its contest. In the proposed order, they are: South Carolina, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Michigan and Virginia.

Iowa has been dropped from the early-state lineup altogether, while South Carolina and Nevada have been placed ahead of New Hampshire — the state that has historically held the nation’s first presidential primary.

To mark the occasion, we are holding our first-ever p…
Democrats Can't Fool The Working Class

27 juli 2026 · 47 min
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By now, the story of how Graham Platner was recruited to run for Senate is well known. Two Democratic Socialist-aligned operatives, Daniel Moraff and Leanne Fan, set out to find a like-minded candidate to challenge Susan Collins in Maine. Lees meer

As Platner told Jon Stewart, at the end of July 2025, “some people came to [his] house” who “had been in Maine for a few months working with the AFL-CIO a bunch of labor unions.” They were looking, as he put it, for “a kind of a working-class person on kind of working-class economic policies.”

Over the next few weeks, the recruiters convinced Platner to run, telling him he could secure Bernie Sanders’s endorsement. He announced his candidacy in mid-August and landed that endorsement by Labor Day. Moraff later told The Wall Street Journal that they had not conducted a traditional background check on Platner.

The candidate recruitment process usually unfolds behind the scenes. But given the spectacular way this campaign unraveled, it has become a central part of the Platner postmortem and of the recriminations now unfolding within the Democratic Party.

It has also thrown a spotlight on a much bigger question: How should Democrats try to win back working-class voters? Recruiting candidates like Graham Platner is one approach. But is it the right one?

To explore that question, I turned to Joan C. Williams, author of Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back. Joan is a Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of California Law San Francisco and one of the country’s leading thinkers on class and American politics.

We discuss what Democrats still misunderstand about working-class voters, why working-class values matter more than working-class aesthetics, and what politicians like Andy Beshear and John Ossoff are doing differently.

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What Has The U.S. Actually Achieved In Iran?

23 juli 2026 · 19 min
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Back in December, I invited Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution onto the podcast to talk about the developing conflict between the United States and Venezuela. At the time, we were discussing the possibility of being at war with Venezuela by the midterms, and I asked Michael whether it could become the next Iraq. He said no. And he was right.

It turns out I just got the country wrong.

Seven months later, we find ourselves in a quagmire in Iran. Of course, it’s an exaggeration to compare it to Iraq at this point. There’s been no ground invasion, and five months is not nine years. But we are in another war of choice in the Middle East that has not gone as intended.

After a 12-week ceasefire, during which the fighting never entirely stopped, Iran’s attacks on commercial vessels in the Strait of Hormuz prompted the United States to launch what is now a 12-day campaign of strikes. In the latest escalation, Iranian attacks on U.S. bases have killed four American service members and injured more than 100.

So where does the war go from here? What has the United States actually accomplished? And what would success even look like at this point?

To answer those questions, I invited Michael O’Hanlon back onto the podcast. He is the Phil Knight Chair in Defense and Strategy at the Brookings Institution and the author of To Dare Mighty Things: U.S. Defense Strategy Since the Revolution.
Can Progressives Win Swing States?

20 juli 2026 · 58 min
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Democrats’ messy internal politics are on full display as we enter the final stretch of primary season. Lees meer

The marquee event is Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary. Over the weekend, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez campaigned across the state with Abdul El-Sayed. Haley Stevens, meanwhile, argued that Sanders was nowhere to be found when she was working with President Obama on the auto bailout, and enters the final weeks of the campaign with a 12-to-1 advantage in television spending.

In Maine, former state Senate president Troy Jackson became the presumptive Democratic nominee to replace Graham Platner on the Senate ballot. A longtime Sanders supporter, Jackson was widely seen as the clearest heir to the movement Platner built before leaving the race.

And on Tuesday, Arizona voters will decide a hotly contested Democratic primary in the 1st Congressional District, one of the most competitive House seats in the country.

On today’s episode, we break down all three contests. We also make sense of President Trump’s primetime address on election security and examine how the White House is trying to shape both the administration of the midterms and public confidence in the results.

Joining me are Mary Radcliffe, head of research at FiftyPlusOne, and Nathaniel Rakich, managing editor of Votebeat.

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Democrats Are Favored. But By How Much?

16 juli 2026 · 24 min
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A hot new model has entered the villa! (Shout-out to Love Island fans.)

On today’s episode, Geoffrey Skelley of Decision Desk HQ joins me to walk through DDHQ’s new 2026 midterm forecast model, why it gives Democrats the advantage in the House, and why election forecasters disagree so sharply about the size of that advantage.

We also check in on two big upcoming primaries. In Michigan, new and conflicting polling has injected fresh uncertainty into the Democratic Senate primary between Haley Stevens and Abdul El-Sayed. In Arizona, Rep. Andy Biggs appears to be cruising toward the Republican nomination for governor and a general-election matchup against the not-particularly-popular Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs.

Then we turn to two unusual Senate contests in which both parties are scrambling to replace candidates on the ballot this fall. In South Carolina, Republicans are preparing for a new primary following the sudden death of Sen. Lindsey Graham. In Maine, Democrats will choose a replacement nominee at a party convention after Graham Platner withdrew from the race.

Skelley joins me to examine both contests and what history tells us about the prospects for replacement candidates.
Why Europe’s Politics Keep Breaking

13 juli 2026 · 59 min
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Some of the episodes that have gotten the strongest response since launching GD POLITICS have been about politics outside the United States — the United Kingdom, Canada, Japan, and Ireland. Lees meer

I’m not entirely sure why. Maybe it’s because international politics is an underserved beat in American media. Maybe people are exhausted by a decade of Trump-dominated news, but still enjoy following politics, making a trip abroad a welcome change of pace. Or maybe my own curiosity comes through in those conversations. I’ve found that when I’m genuinely excited to learn about something, it usually makes for a better show. Or perhaps, more cynically, it’s nice to hear that other countries’ politics are messed up too. We in America are not alone.

Whatever the reason, it’s something that I want to keep doing, and it’s what we’re doing today, because there’s been some big election news across the pond lately.

Last week, French right-wing populist Marine Le Pen was cleared to run for president in next year’s election after a court shortened her five-year ban on running for office for misusing European Union funds. The same day, she announced her candidacy.

In the United Kingdom, Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced his resignation as prime minister late last month. Nominations are currently open to replace him as Labour leader, and only one candidate has emerged: former mayor of Manchester Andy Burnham.

If he remains uncontested, he could be declared leader of the party as soon as this Friday and become prime minister the following Monday. This is all happening just two years after Labour won the third-largest majority in the party’s history.

With me to make sense of it all, and to meander into conversations about the World Cup, NATO, and air conditioning, is our European correspondent, Lenny Bronner.

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What Platner’s Exit Means For Control Of The Senate

9 juli 2026 · 16 min
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We’ve gotten some dramatic updates since the last time we discussed the state of the 2026 midterms. Chief among them is, of course, that Graham Platner announced he’ll drop out of the Maine Senate race after he was accused of rape. He denies the allegations.

The Maine Democratic Party now has until July 27 to replace him on the ballot. It plans on hosting a convention of about 600 delegates made up of local party officials from around the state. The party’s executive director suggested candidates may need to collect signatures from voters in order to be eligible at the convention.

On today’s episode, election forecasters Lakshya Jain of The Argument and Zachary Donnini of VoteHub join me to discuss how Platner’s departure will shake up the fight for control of the Senate. Both of their forecasts suggest it will improve Democrats’ odds in Maine, but that may not be enough to make them favorites to control the chamber.

Maine also isn’t the only must-win Senate seat for Democrats that’s recently been in flux. In Michigan, state Sen. Mallory McMorrow dropped out of the Democratic primary last Sunday, leaving a two-person race between establishment-backed Haley Stevens and progressive-backed Abdul El-Sayed. They faced off in a debate this week and will face off on the ballot next month.

We discuss the dynamics of that race and the ideological divides within the party more broadly. We also ask what lessons Democrats — both progressives and the establishment — can learn from what just happened in Maine.
What Does 'Liberal' Even Mean Anymore?

6 juli 2026 · 1 uur 4 min
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I hope everyone is recovering nicely from their July 4th hangover. At 250 — hell, at 35 — those things aren’t single-day affairs anymore. Lees meer

Today’s episode is a conversation I had with Adrian Wooldridge about his new book, “The Revolutionary Center: The Lost Genius of Liberalism.” Adrian is the global business columnist at Bloomberg and was previously the political editor at The Economist.

To be honest, I had intended to air this conversation in the run-up to our semiquincentennial. After all, the Declaration of Independence may well be the most famous liberal document ever written.

But as the calendar worked out, our last episode before the Fourth was a paid episode, and I thought this conversation was a worthwhile listen for the wider GD universe. (Although, of course, if you appreciate this podcast, I encourage you to become a paid subscriber👇️) So I’m publishing it now, for folks to chew on as we return from the weekend’s celebrations.

The word “liberal” gets thrown around a lot. It’s used to poke fun at the left (”resistance libs”) or chastise the right (”neolibs”), and in American politics today, it’s not clear what it even means.

Adrian clearly defines liberalism and lays out a forceful case for why it’s a worthwhile worldview today, despite some of its failures.

We talk about who can be a liberal, according to Adrian, both socialists and nationalists, but not populists. We discuss where the ideas came from and how they developed over the centuries, and how liberalism addresses the challenges of today. It was an enlightening (pun intended) conversation, and I hope you appreciate it too.

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America At 250: Polarized, But Not 50-50

2 juli 2026 · 22 min
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Happy 250th birthday, America! To mark the occasion, Gabe Fleisher of Wake Up To Politics joined me to run a full diagnostic on the republic as it wraps up its 250th year.

First up: good data, bad data, or not data? Americans are about as interested in commemorating the country’s 250th birthday as they were in commemorating the bicentennial 50 years ago. But underneath that stable topline is a much more divided country. In 1976, Democrats and Republicans were roughly equally interested in the celebration. Today, Republicans are 33 points likelier than Democrats to say they want to commemorate the occasion.

Then, a look back at a blockbuster Supreme Court term. The justices closed out the term by overturning two precedents: greenlighting presidential removal of independent agency officials in Trump v. Slaughter and lifting limits on party-candidate coordinated spending. They also rejected Trump’s reinterpretation of birthright citizenship. Gabe, who was in the courtroom when NPR briefly “retired” Justice Alito, explains why this is a conservative court but not a MAGA court.

Congress, meanwhile, is on pace to be the least productive in modern history, and yet it just passed the first major housing package in 30 years with veto-proof majorities. Will Trump accept yes for an answer? And will the housing bill become law regardless?

Finally, the latest New York Times polls show Senate races in North Carolina, Maine, Texas, Ohio, Iowa, and Alaska all within the margin of error, even as majorities in nearly every one of those states call the Democratic Party too extreme. And a new Pew typology survey finds that beneath our 50-50 stalemate, Americans hold supermajority positions on issue after issue. We’re emotionally polarized (see the …
Late Ballots, Iran Polling, And A Maine Toss-Up

29 juni 2026 · 59 min
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Shortly before we started taping today’s episode, the Supreme Court handed down decisions in a couple of cases we’ve been watching. Lees meer

In Watson v. RNC, the court ruled that ballots postmarked by Election Day can still be counted after Election Day in states where that is legal. Nathaniel Rakich of Votebeat explains why the ruling preserves the status quo in more than a dozen states and why Donald Trump is unlikely to stop attacking late-arriving mail ballots anytime soon.

We also discuss another pair of decisions involving independent agencies. The court allowed Trump to fire Federal Trade Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter, but said Federal Reserve member Lisa Cook could remain in her job while she challenges her firing. That suggests the court may be willing to expand presidential control over many independent regulators while treating the Fed as a special case.

Then we turn to the Trump administration’s deal with Iran. Mary Radcliffe of FiftyPlusOne walks us through the polling on the agreement, which shows that Americans generally support efforts to end the war, but are much less sure that the deal will actually work. That leads us into a broader conversation about the national political environment, whether the generic ballot has really tightened, and what a new New York Times poll of the Maine Senate race tells us about the race between Graham Platner and Susan Collins.

Finally, in Good Data, Bad Data or Not Data, we look at a Washington Post analysis arguing that prediction markets are well calibrated. The verdict: not so fast.

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Is This The Democratic Tea Party?

25 juni 2026 · 23 min
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As we suggested might happen on Monday’s episode, this week’s primaries in New York City launched a narrative war over the Democratic Party: Is Mamdani now a Democratic kingmaker? Is the socialist left the future of the party? And are we witnessing a Democratic version of the Tea Party?

On today’s episode, Mary Radcliffe of FiftyPlusOne and Nathaniel Rakich of Votebeat join me to debate that last question.

First, we try to define what the Tea Party actually was. Was it an ideological movement aimed at enacting conservative policy on taxes, spending, and health care? Was it simply an anti-establishment backlash? And was the election of Donald Trump the nail in the coffin for the Tea Party or its crowning achievement?

Then we ask whether anything similar is happening now on the left. Nathaniel makes the case that Democrats are seeing the beginnings of a Tea Party-style insurgency. Mary is more skeptical, pointing out that the socialist left remains a relatively small faction of the party.

We also talk about where the comparison may be strongest. The Tea Party’s power was not just that it won primaries. It was that it changed what Republican politicians felt they had to say and do. On the Democratic side, the clearest example may be Israel and Palestine, where candidates backed by pro-Israel groups are facing increasing scrutiny in Democratic primaries.

Give it a listen and let us know in the comments where you come down!
New York’s Dress Rehearsal For 2028

22 juni 2026 · 1 uur
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New York City is not America. It is denser, younger, more renter-heavy and more ideologically left than the country as a whole. Lees meer

But that does not mean its politics are irrelevant to the national Democratic Party. In fact, this week’s congressional primaries in New York may offer a preview of several fights Democrats are likely to have between now and 2028.

On today’s episode of the GD POLITICS podcast, politics writer Michael Lange joins me to make the case that Tuesday’s primaries are, in some ways, a dress rehearsal for the next Democratic presidential primary.

We talk about the battle between socialists and progressives in New York’s 7th Congressional District, where a retiring Nydia Velázquez has opened up one of the youngest and bluest seats in the country. We also discuss the challenge to Rep. Adriano Espaillat in New York’s 13th District, where questions of race, ideology, Israel-Palestine and incumbency are all colliding.

Then we turn to the race to replace Jerry Nadler in New York’s 12th District, one of the best-educated and most politically engaged places in the country, where the politics of artificial intelligence have become central. And we look at Dan Goldman’s primary challenge from Brad Lander in New York’s 10th District, where AIPAC, local political roots and the post-Mamdani left all loom large.

Finally, we head north of the city to New York’s 17th Congressional District, one of the most important battleground seats in the country, where Democrats are deciding what kind of candidate they want to put up against Republican Rep. Mike Lawler.

The big question running through all of this: Are these races revealing where the Democratic Party is headed, or are they mostly telling us about the strange and specific politics of New York?

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.gdpolitics.com/subscribe
Do Fed-Up Americans Really Move To Canada? And Other Listener Questions

18 juni 2026 · 15 min
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Today’s episode is a long-overdue listener mailbag, which means we’re getting into some of the great questions that have been piling up in the paid-subscriber chat.

For example, how do likely voter models actually work? Do people really move abroad because of politics, or is that mostly just something people say after an election doesn’t go their way? Could a senator switching parties ever change control of Congress? Are prediction markets headed for a steady stream of insider-trading scandals? And at what point does an unpopular president start losing control of his own party in Congress?

There are also some more election-specific questions: whether Nevada Gov. Joe Lombardo is one of the most endangered incumbents in the country, what makes Rob Sand a viable Democratic candidate in Iowa, how much the latest round of redistricting could shift the House map toward Republicans, and what history’s highest-turnout midterm might tell us about the political moment we’re living through now.

Plus, we answer a question about recently ousted Texas Sen. John Cornyn, who, by the way, co-authored the legislation that made Juneteenth a federal holiday. A listener wanted to know whether he’ll seek retribution in his final months before retirement.

This episode is also a bit different from usual: it’s just me, solo, doing my best talk-radio impression and answering as many of your questions as I can before my voice gives out.

Thanks, as always, to everyone who submitted questions in the paid-subscriber chat. We didn’t get to all of them, which means we’ll have to do this again soon!
What The Early 2026 Midterm Forecasts Say

15 juni 2026 · 1 uur 1 min
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We are four and a half months out from Election Day 2026, which means forecast season is officially beginning. Lees meer

On today’s episode of the GD POLITICS podcast, I spoke with two election forecasters whose models are beginning to shape how we understand the midterms: Lakshya Jain, head of political data at The Argument and CEO of Split Ticket, and Zachary Donnini, head of data science at VoteHub.

VoteHub’s midterm forecast is officially live, but Split Ticket’s is set to publish later this week, meaning listeners are getting an exclusive preview of the work Lakshya has been doing.

The forecasts agree on the big picture: Democrats are favored to win the House, while the Senate is close to a toss-up, with Republicans holding a slight edge. But under the hood, the models diverge in meaningful ways.

VoteHub gives Democrats a 72 percent chance of winning the House, while The Argument/Split Ticket puts the odds at 90 percent. The biggest reason is how the two models treat the national political environment. VoteHub’s model is built around a Democratic advantage of about seven points on the generic ballot. The Argument/Split Ticket model, relying in part on its own likely-voter polling, sees something closer to a nine-point Democratic environment.

The two also differ on whether to incorporate prediction markets. VoteHub does, though Zach emphasized that Kalshi markets are weighted lightly in low-volume House races and more heavily in higher-volume Senate races. His argument is that prediction markets can sometimes pick up information before polls do, especially from late-breaking scandals or meaningful early-vote data.

Lakshya is more skeptical. He sees value in prediction markets, but worries about feedback loops and overreactions.

The Senate picture is even more interesting. The two forecasts are almost identical at the chamber level: VoteHub gives Republicans a 55 percent chance of retaining the Senate, while The Argument/Split Ticket puts it at 53 percent.

But the…
How Do Democrats Solve A Problem Like Graham Platner?

10 juni 2026 · 13 min
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On today’s podcast, Nate Silver joins me to talk about the Maine Senate race, the political fallout of the war in Iran, and much more. Nate had some spicy takes, as you’ll hear.

The Maine primary is now completed, and with 80 percent of the expected vote tallied, Platner received 72 percent of the vote. Although Janet Mills had already dropped out of the race, her name remained on the ballot and she received 20 percent. Call it a protest vote.

On paper, Maine should be one of Democrats’ best Senate pickup opportunities this cycle. It’s a blue-leaning state in a Democratic-leaning national environment. But after a series of personal controversies, Platner’s campaign has become something more complicated: a test of how much candidate quality and character matter in an era of strong partisanship.

Nate makes the case that, for the good of the Democratic Party, Platner should drop out. I play devil’s advocate and ask whether Democrats are likely to rally around him anyway once he becomes inevitable.

We also discuss the political risk of a quagmire after the United States’ renewed strikes on Iran in retaliation for a downed Apache helicopter. If the war drags on, and inflation continues to rise, it could shape the midterms more than any one candidate’s scandals.

Then we turn to California, where the slow vote count in the Los Angeles mayoral race has once again raised questions about election administration in the country’s largest state. Nate argues that taking this long to count votes is itself a problem, especially when distrust in elections is already so easy to exploit.

Lastly, since this is a conversation with Nate, we end with a forecast model. Nate walks through what went into his World Cup forecast: things like national GDP…
Why Right-Wing Populism Hasn’t Taken Off In Ireland

8 juni 2026 · 1 uur 11 min
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While I was in Dublin recently, I sat down with Hugh Linehan of The Irish Times’ Inside Politics podcast to talk about Irish and American politics. We start with a question that gets asked frequently about Ireland: Why hasn’t right-wing populism taken off there? Lees meer

Across much of Europe and the English-speaking world, the populist right has become a major political force. Donald Trump reshaped the Republican Party in the United States. Brexit transformed British politics. Marine Le Pen’s party has become a central player in France. Far-right or right-populist parties have broken through in Italy, Spain, Portugal, Sweden, and elsewhere.

Ireland, so far, has been different.

There are anti-immigration activists, small right-wing parties and some independent politicians trying to occupy that space. But Ireland has not had the kind of durable, mass right-populist breakthrough that has become familiar elsewhere.

Hugh and I talk through some of the possible reasons why. Ireland is not living through the same kind of decline narrative that has fueled populism in other countries. In many ways, the country is more prosperous and globally successful than it has ever been. Its experience with immigration is also more recent and distinct from countries like the United States, Britain, and France. And Sinn Féin may occupy some of the political terrain that, in other countries, has been claimed by the populist right: nationalist, anti-establishment, rooted in working-class and rural communities — but on the left.

From there, we get into the bigger Irish story: the country’s remarkable economic rise, its dependence on a small number of large American companies for corporate tax revenue, the strange politics of neutrality and defense, and what it means for a small country to rely so heavily on the kindness, or at least the continued cooperation, of larger powers.

Then Hugh turns the tables and asks me about the United States: gerrymandering, the Voting Rights Act, the two-party …
Is Iowa The New Maine For Democrats?

3 juni 2026 · 16 min
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Democrats entered the 2026 cycle with a difficult Senate map and a familiar hope: maybe Maine would be the race that helped them claw their way toward a majority.

But after this week, that picture is getting more complicated. Iowa, a state Donald Trump won by double digits, is suddenly demanding more attention. And Maine, a state Kamala Harris carried comfortably, is looking messier than Democrats would like.

On this installment of the podcast, I’m joined by Mary Radcliffe of 50+1 and Jacob Rubashkin of Inside Elections to react to the June 2 primaries in Iowa, California, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico, and South Dakota.

In Iowa, Democrats got their preferred Senate nominee. Josh Turek, a state representative and Paralympic gold medalist, beat Zach Wahls by a wide margin. Turek will now face Republican Rep. Ashley Hinson in what could become one of the most important Senate races of the cycle.

The state has moved sharply right in recent years, but Democrats have reason to think the political environment could put it back on the map. Rob Sand, the Democratic nominee for governor, has led in the limited polling we have. And on the Republican side of the governor’s race, the GOP primary produced a surprise: Trump-backed Rep. Randy Feenstra lost narrowly to MAHA-aligned businessman Zach Lahn, who was a major investor in — depending on your level of generosity — either a medical technology company or a sex-toy company.

We also check in on California, where slow vote-counting means several major races are still unresolved; Montana, where Democrats are trying to navigate an independent Senate bid; New Jersey, where a key House race is taking shape amid Rep. Tom Kean Jr.’s continued absence from public view; and South Dakota, where R…
Sexts, Autopsies, and Primary Chaos

1 juni 2026 · 1 uur 3 min
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On today’s podcast, I’m back from vacation and joined by Mary Radcliffe of 50+1 and Jacob Rubashkin of Inside Elections to catch up on everything I missed while I was away. Lees meer

We start in Maine, where Graham Platner’s Senate campaign is disputing the number of women he sexted with — a dozen or half a dozen? Platner has already weathered a series of damaging stories about his past, and so far, Democratic primary voters do not seem especially moved. But it’s unclear how the broader electorate will react to the steady drip of scandal.

Then we turn to Texas, where Ken Paxton is officially the Republican nominee for Senate against Democrat James Talarico. Paxton comes with his own baggage and a much weaker fundraising operation, though a hotly contested primary against John Cornyn may be suppressing his current polling against Talarico. We’re waiting for the dust to settle.

We also discuss the DNC’s unfinished 2024 autopsy report, which was both incomplete and revealing. The report omitted some of the biggest questions about the 2024 campaign: Joe Biden’s age, the debate, the way Kamala Harris became the nominee, Gaza, and the broader failures of Biden’s presidency. So, does the Democratic Party actually want to understand what went wrong?

Then we preview Tuesday’s primaries for California governor and L.A. mayor, both of which have three candidates polling in the twenties. Given the state’s top-two system, it’s unclear who will advance to the general election: one Democrat and one Republican, or two Democrats?

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.gdpolitics.com/subscribe

Alle afleveringen

A Watergate-Scale Rebuke To Trump

Our Final Takes On The 2026 Election

Your Hour-By-Hour Guide To Election Night

Two Pollsters. Two Reads On The Wave.

BONUS: Talking Midterms With The Irish Times

How Far Can Democrats Expand The Map?

BONUS: A Poll Hunter’s Guide to the Final Stretch

What Trump’s Voters Are Saying Now

Will The Midterms Be Free And Fair?

Inside The Fight For The House

Alex Bores Puts The Odds Of AI Doom At 20%

The Fight For The Right After Trump

Your Midterms Questions, Debated Over Drinks

What Do America’s Socialists Want?

Why Alaska Is 2026’s Most Unusual Battleground

If The Polls Are Wrong, This Is Why

Peltola Unfiltered, Polls Galore, And The Likeliest Senate Flips

Is This Time Different In Texas?

Georgia’s 2026 Election Is Already About 2028

The AI Apocalypse Comes To Washington

‘Still Counting’ After All These Years

How Far Can The Redistricting Arms Race Go?

You Can’t Poll Away Uncertainty

This Is What A Blue Wave Looks Like

Are Data Centers The ‘Sleeper Issue’ Of 2026?

Millennials Are Taking Over American Politics

Could Texas Tip The Senate?

The Latino Vote Is Up For Grabs

Nate Silver’s Forecast Is Bullish On Democrats

Will Wisconsin Elect A Democratic Socialist?

El-Sayed Won. The Polls Did Not.

Scandal, Insurgents, And Big Money

We Drafted The Perfect Primary Calendar

Democrats Can't Fool The Working Class

What Has The U.S. Actually Achieved In Iran?

Can Progressives Win Swing States?

Democrats Are Favored. But By How Much?

Why Europe’s Politics Keep Breaking

What Platner’s Exit Means For Control Of The Senate

What Does 'Liberal' Even Mean Anymore?

America At 250: Polarized, But Not 50-50

Late Ballots, Iran Polling, And A Maine Toss-Up

Is This The Democratic Tea Party?

New York’s Dress Rehearsal For 2028

Do Fed-Up Americans Really Move To Canada? And Other Listener Questions

What The Early 2026 Midterm Forecasts Say

How Do Democrats Solve A Problem Like Graham Platner?

Why Right-Wing Populism Hasn’t Taken Off In Ireland

Is Iowa The New Maine For Democrats?

Sexts, Autopsies, and Primary Chaos