GD POLITICS

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.)
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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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.

During the decade that Donald Trump has dominated American politics, no major part of the electorate has changed as dramatically as Latino voters.
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 lock on Latino voters anymore. What happens next will depend, in part, on what each chooses to do about 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

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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.
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.

In case one progressive-versus-moderate swing-state showdown wasn’t enough, Wisconsin is running it back this week with its Democratic gubernatorial primary.
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.


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