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

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

Shortly before we started taping today’s episode, the Supreme Court handed down decisions in a couple of cases we’ve been watching. 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. 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 [https://www.gdpolitics.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

Is This The Democratic Tea Party?

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.gdpolitics.com [https://www.gdpolitics.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_7] 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 [https://www.gdpolitics.com/listen]. As we suggested might happen on Monday’s episode [https://www.gdpolitics.com/p/new-yorks-dress-rehearsal-for-2028], 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

New York City is not America. It is denser, younger, more renter-heavy and more ideologically left than the country as a whole. 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 [https://www.gdpolitics.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

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

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.gdpolitics.com [https://www.gdpolitics.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_7] 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 [https://www.gdpolitics.com/listen]. 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 [https://substack.com/chat/1603893?utm_source=pub-nav-bar]. 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

We are four and a half months out from Election Day 2026, which means forecast season is officially beginning. 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 race-level forecasts differ substantially. In Georgia, VoteHub gives Sen. Jon Ossoff an 87 percent chance of winning reelection. The Argument/Split Ticket puts him at 98 percent. Lakshya argues that Georgia is simply not red enough, especially in a Democratic-leaning national environment, to justify treating Ossoff as vulnerable. Zach agrees Ossoff is favored, but his model is more cautious because it adjusts for the possibility that competitive states in 2024 were artificially bluer than their underlying partisanship. Other divergences tell us a lot about how forecasting works. In Michigan, Lakshya said he thinks VoteHub’s forecast is probably better than his own, because early polling suggests Democrats may not be as strong there as his fundamentals-heavy model currently implies. In Florida, Zach said Lakshya’s model may be capturing something VoteHub is not: the continued Republican strength among Florida’s older and Hispanic voters. That was the spirit of the whole conversation. Lakshya and Zach are not dueling forecasters, but friends with different ideas about what inputs to use in a model. And that may be the most useful takeaway. Forecasts are not magic. They are structured arguments about what matters, what data should count and how uncertain we should be. In 2026, those arguments point to a Democratic edge in the House, a highly competitive Senate and a midterm that could determine whether Trump spends the final two years of his presidency constrained by Congress or empowered by it. 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 [https://www.gdpolitics.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]