GD POLITICS

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 https://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!

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 implications for 2028. And I consider how this election differs from 2022 and whether it might come to be seen through a lens of betrayal.

Hope you enjoy the episode, and we’ll see you on election night!

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

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit https://www.gdpolitics.com

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 https://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 secures a majority without those seats, we could know much sooner.

So sit back, enjoy your morning coffee in bed, and get ready for Tuesday. As Nathaniel puts it: “Get in. We’re going electioning.”

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit https://www.gdpolitics.com

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 https://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 trouble. And we talk about why religion may be an underrated dividing line in American politics.

Plus, each names a race where the consensus is most wrong, and we take a listener question on why rural voters are still so hard to poll.

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 https://gdpolitics.com!

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 https://www.gdpolitics.com/subscribe

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?

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 https://www.gdpolitics.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit https://www.gdpolitics.com

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!

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit https://www.gdpolitics.com

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.

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!

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 days later, is a more concerning prospect.

So how much anxiety is warranted, and where should we direct our attention? That’s the conversation today.

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

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit https://www.gdpolitics.com

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.

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.

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 https://www.gdpolitics.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit https://www.gdpolitics.com

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.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit https://www.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.

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!

Heads up: We’re hosting our first-ever virtual happy hour for paid subscribers on Tuesday, October 6, at 8 p.m. ET at https://www.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!

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 https://www.gdpolitics.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit https://www.gdpolitics.com

Heads up: We’re hosting our first-ever virtual happy hour for paid subscribers on Tuesday, October 6, at 8 p.m. ET at https://www.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 doesn’t map neatly onto the usual red-versus-blue divide. More than 60 percent of its voters are not registered with a political party, rural Alaska often votes Democratic, and moderate Republicans regularly govern alongside Democrats. It is the only state where bipartisan coalitions control both chambers of the legislature.

Joining me from Juneau to talk about it all is James Brooks, statehouse and politics reporter for the Alaska Beacon.

Heads up: We’re hosting our first-ever virtual happy hour for paid subscribers on Tuesday, October 6, at 8 p.m. ET at https://www.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!

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

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit https://www.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 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:

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!

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 https://www.gdpolitics.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit https://www.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.

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.

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.”

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 Research Group. He writes the newsletter “Real Research on Artificial Intelligence.” Mary Radcliffe is head of research at FiftyPlusOne.

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

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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, once again, make sure to subscribe to join us on our new adventure!