GD POLITICS

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!
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

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

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