GD POLITICS

When we last checked in on the economy on the podcast, on February 23, Harvard economist Jason Furman said it looked like the U.S. had pulled off the first soft landing of the postwar era. Inflation was largely under control, the labor market was solid, and growth looked decent too. Five days later, the United States went to war with Iran, upending the global economy. Since then, oil is up about 5...

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 . Where do we begin? Tuesday gave us plenty of election results worth digging into. In Georgia’s 14th Congressional District, Democrats turned in their biggest overpe...

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 . President Trump’s approval rating now sits just below 40 percent, according to the Silver Bulletin average. That makes for a good headline, but it’s still well abov...

On today’s podcast, we’re taking a break from American politics and diving into the seemingly consensus-driven — but in reality quite messy — politics of Japan. I spoke with Kenneth Mori McElwain, a professor of comparative politics at the University of Tokyo, on the final day of my two-week trip to Japan. It was a welcome chance to step off the American news-cycle hamster wheel and use the time t...

I am back from Japan and I hope you enjoyed the evergreen conversations we published while I was away. Today it’s back to the news cycle, although in a somewhat different format. I’d planned on getting up to speed on the news I missed and talking to Nathaniel Rakich and Mary Radcliffe about it. However, when I woke up from an in-flight nap on Saturday, Nathaniel and Mary had messaged me telling me...

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 . Democrats are in the midst of an intraparty debate over how to win their way out of the wilderness. There are arguments about ideology, strategy, identity, and more...

If you’ve spent time reading think pieces on the internet during the past handful of years, you might have come across the following ideas: first, that American men are suffering from a loneliness epidemic and, second, that conservatives are happier than liberals. If you aren’t familiar with these takes, then you probably aren’t online enough to experience the sad loneliness of the American male l...

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 . Depending on who you ask, we’re either living through a moment that feels totally unprecedented or alarmingly familiar. Today’s guest argues it’s alarmingly familia...

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 . On today’s episode, we open up the mailbag for an overdue round of listener questions — and you had some great ones! You asked whether Democrats might be locked out...

We are entering our thirteenth day of the war in Iran, and we’ve been getting conflicting signals about how long it might last and what the end goal actually is. At the start, it seemed the goal was regime change. President Trump called on Iran’s forces to lay down their arms and for civilians to revolt, saying the operation could last four to five weeks. Since then, Trump has also called for Iran...

We are officially in the second week of the war with Iran and the fallout is intensifying. President Trump now says the goal is Iran’s unconditional surrender. Meanwhile, Iran’s clerics have appointed Ali Khamenei’s hardline son as the new Supreme Leader, suggesting surrender is unlikely for now. Fifteen countries have become involved in the conflict in some way, the number of U.S. service members...

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 . The war in Iran has set off a civil war within the Republican Party over whether the military adventurism of Trump’s second term is America first or America last. A...

Looking for nerdy yet irreverent coverage of the Texas primaries Tuesday night?! We’ll be live streaming with friends of the pod beginning at 7:30pm ET on March 3rd. Join us at the link here . We were originally planning on dedicating today’s whole episode to the kickoff of the 2026 primary calendar with Tuesday’s elections in Texas, North Carolina and Arkansas. However, if I’ve learned anything h...

President Trump offered strikingly few proposals in the longest State of the Union address ever delivered and what he did offer was not particularly heavy on legislation or ambition. Instead, he leaned into conflict with the Democrats in the chamber and highlighted stories from guests in the audience that often included graphic details. Friends of the podcast Mary Radcliffe and Nathaniel Rakich jo...

Today’s episode turned out to be serendipitous. Last Friday, I’d been planning to speak with Harvard economist Jason Furman, Obama’s top economic advisor, about the recent flood of economic data: the jobs report and revisions for the past year, inflation data, GDP growth, trade balances, consumer sentiment, and more. There was one piece of data I did not expect we’d be getting in advance of our co...

Subscribe to GD POLITICS wherever you listen to podcasts. The video version of this interview is available here . My favorite interviews with politicians happen when they’ve run their last race and can reflect candidly on their time in office and the complexities of politics and the world. Today you’re going to hear such an interview with former governor of Texas and former secretary of energy Ric...

Heads up: We have a live show scheduled for Wednesday, March 4 at the Comedy Cellar in New York City! After a rowdy live 2028 Democratic primary draft last month, Nate Silver, Clare Malone, and I will tackle the Republican side of the ledger. Grab tickets here ! If you’ve been enjoying your long weekend, I apologize for the potentially panic-inducing content of today’s episode. We seem to be in so...

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 . Also, heads up: We have a live show scheduled for Wednesday, March 4 at the Comedy Cellar in New York City! After a rowdy live 2028 Democratic presidential primary...

Heads up: We have a live show scheduled for Wednesday, March 4 at the Comedy Cellar in New York City! Nate Silver, Clare Malone, and I will share our reactions from the Texas primaries and much more. You can get tickets here . Primary season is starting with a bang in just three weeks. Texans will decide which Democrat and Republican they’d like to see face off in a potentially competitive Senate...

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 . On Monday’s episode we began to set the table for the 2026 midterms. Today we acknowledge that there’s something of a bull threatening all the fine china we’ve just...

This is our start-of-the-year, table-setting episode for the 2026 midterms. A flood of January news pushed it back, but the clock is now ticking. The primaries begin in just four weeks. Republicans begin with control of the House by the slimmest of margins. To flip the chamber, Democrats would need to gain five seats. Republicans have a safer margin in the Senate, where Democrats would need to gai...

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 . Democrats are gearing up to turn the page on the Trump presidency and some 2028 hopefuls will likely announce their intentions by year’s end. At least a half-dozen...

Call this something of an emergency podcast. I’d planned on airing an episode setting the table for the 2026 midterms today. We’re going to save that for another day, because on Saturday a federal immigration officer in Minneapolis shot and killed Alex Pretti, a 37 year-old Veterans Affairs hospital ICU nurse. It’s the second killing by a federal immigration officer in Minneapolis in less than thr...

Trump has now been back in office for a year. To help make sense of the past twelve months, on Tuesday I hosted a live Substack conversation with friend of the pod and author of the Wake Up To Politics newsletter, Gabe Fleischer . We began by assessing Trump’s accomplishments and failings by the standards he set at the beginning of his second term. We also discussed how Americans have reacted and...

I hope everyone had a nice long weekend! Today’s episode is part two of our mailbag episodes, focusing on some of the more esoteric questions that listeners asked. Part one focused on current events. If you’re curious about how the public is reacting to the surge in ICE activity, possibility of military intervention in Iran, or the politicization of the Department of Justice, I encourage you to li...