GD POLITICS

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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 overperformance in a special House election since 2024, in the race to replace Marjorie Taylor Greene. Republicans still won, but by a margin 25 points more Democratic than the district’s baseline.
And then there was Wisconsin, where the liberal candidate for the state Supreme Court won by — checks notes — 20 points. Twenty points, in a statewide race, in the consummate swing state. There are caveats, which we’ll get into, but taken together, it’s an unnerving picture for Republicans.
Speaking of unnerving pictures, this is our first episode since President Trump threatened to kill “a whole civilization” early Tuesday and then, by day’s end, agreed to a ceasefire with Iran. We recorded this Wednesday afternoon, when a lot was still in flux, so some of the details may have changed by the time you hear this.
At the moment, even the contours of the ceasefire are murky. Is the Strait of Hormuz actually open? Is an end to Israel’s invasion of Lebanon part of the deal? Have strikes in the Gulf really stopped? And that’s before you get to the longer-term problem: the American and Iranian visions for any lasting agreement still seem fundamentally incompatible.
Politically, incompatible narratives are emerging too. The White House is claiming victory over a severely diminished Iranian military. But the regime is still in place, Iran still has its enriched uranium, and it now appears to have a say — and even a financial stake — in who passes through the Strait of Hormuz.
Also on the docket today: the election this Sunday in Hungary and a “Good Data, Bad Data or Not Data” question on polling showing Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger floundering in approval polls after winning by 15 points last fall.
With me to talk about all of it are Mary Radcliffe, head of research at FiftyPlusOne, and Lenny Bronner, senior data scientist at The Washington Post.

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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.
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 above the zone presidents reach when things truly fall apart. Both Bushes saw their approval sink into the mid-to-high twenties during their time in office, as did Jimmy Carter and Richard Nixon.
And while approval in the high thirties to low forties is politically dangerous, it does not necessarily herald the kind of sea change that produced the Watergate reforms or the Reagan Revolution.
For most of Trump’s decade in the political spotlight, the conventional wisdom has been that he is sui generis. No matter the controversy, the thinking goes, he will retain a base of support strong enough to keep his approval from falling to the levels reached by America’s least popular presidents.
In light of the political backlash to the ongoing conflict in Iran, Nate Silver and I took to Substack Live to ask whether that wisdom will hold in Trump’s second term. We also talked about the midterms, the Democrats, and plenty more. Nate even shared when he plans to launch his midterm forecast, plus what Elon Musk called him in their latest beef 😬.

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 to get a sense Japanese politics.
The stereotype of Japanese politics is that it is staid and steady, conservative in both the capital-“C” and lowercase-“c” meanings of the word. The conservative party, the Liberal Democratic Party, has governed Japan for 66 of the 70 years it has existed. But even with this apparent political consensus, a bias for the status quo has made it difficult, at times, to tackle big questions.
The LDP remains in power today, but Japanese politics has not felt especially staid or steady lately. Last month, Sanae Takaichi, the country’s first female prime minister, secured the largest majority in Japan’s postwar history — a two-thirds supermajority in the lower house. That came less than two years after scandal cost the LDP 28 percent of its seats and forced it into minority government.
Now Takaichi is confronting a daunting set of problems. Japan has finally emerged from decades of deflation, but wages have not kept pace with rising prices, contributing to a cost-of-living crisis. While I was visiting, gas prices hit a record high.
At the same time, Japan’s pacifist constitution is once again a live political issue. Drafted during the U.S. occupation after World War II, it renounced Japan’s right to wage war. In its 80-year history, it has never been amended, making it the world’s longest-lived unamended national constitution. Takaichi says she wants to change that.
Japan also famously faces a rapidly aging population. Takaichi has promised to deliver economic growth, while maintaining tough limits on immigration and avoiding a further expansion of the national debt.
And that is before getting to some of the country’s other high-profile cultural debates, including whether women should be allowed to become reigning empresses and whether married couples should be allowed to keep separate surnames. At the moment, the answer to both is no and Takaichi wants to keep it that way.
The big question facing Takaichi at the moment is whether she can translate her sky-high popularity into tangible results for the Japanese people.


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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 that they had planned the whole podcast already and that it would be best if I didn’t go on twitter or read up on the news ahead of time. Just show up and turn the show over to them.
So (and this is how much I trust them) that is what we did on today’s podcast. I relinquished hosting duties to Mary and Nathaniel and they quizzed me on the twists and turns of the past two weeks.


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.
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. And while these debates always feel urgent for the party out of power, they are, at the very least, not new.
Parties and politicians have been trying to figure out how to shore up their vulnerabilities, enhance their strengths, and fight another day for just about as long as representative politics have existed.
Today we are going to focus on one such instance. We’re looking back at late-20th-century Nevada and the beginnings of a political machine built by former Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.
It’s the subject of a new book by CEO of the Nevada Independent Jon Ralston, titled, “The Game Changer: How Harry Reid Remade the Rules and Showed Democrats How to Fight.”