Show Notes
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit 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 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.
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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 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!
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 free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.gdpolitics.com
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit 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! 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.