(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 , 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!

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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.

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.

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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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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.

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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.

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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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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, , head of research at FiftyPlusOne, and , managing editor at Votebeat, help me unpack that conclusion. We also dig into questions about whether the primary vote in Alaska is predictive of the midterm results this fall. Plus, after a fake pollster caught our attention last week, we’re digging deeper into the Wild West of startup pollsters and how they shape public perceptions of political races.

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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.

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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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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.

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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.

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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 lock on Latino voters anymore. What happens next will depend, in part, on what each chooses to do about it.

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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.

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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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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.

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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.

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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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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.

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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 primary calendar draft. If a select group of states is going to vote first, which states should they be? Nathaniel Rakich and Mary Radcliffe join me for this very nerdy (and genuinely fun) exercise in redesigning the presidential primary calendar.

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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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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.

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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.

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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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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.

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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.

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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, .

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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.

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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.

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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.