GD POLITICS

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The way Americans choose their presidential nominees is largely an accident of history.
Some states began holding more open primaries during the Progressive Era in the early 20th century, but the nominating process was substantially democratized after the disastrous 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
No one set out to give Iowa and New Hampshire so much influence. But after the process opened up, and Jimmy Carter propelled his campaign by camping out in Iowa ahead of the 1976 caucuses, building momentum in the early states became essential to winning a presidential nomination.
The result is a system that some consider nonsensical, or at least unfair. Why give so much power to a handful of states? Why not have everyone vote at the same time, or have groups of states vote together? And what is so bad about letting party conventions choose the nominees in the first place? That would be closer to how political parties in most other democracies select their candidates.
In 2028, the process is getting shaken up again, just not in any of those ways. The early states will retain their outsized influence, but Democrats are reshuffling which states receive the privilege.
Under a newly proposed Democratic National Committee calendar, six states would vote before Super Tuesday, the earliest date on which any other state would be allowed to hold its contest. In the proposed order, they are: South Carolina, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Michigan and Virginia.
Iowa has been dropped from the early-state lineup altogether, while South Carolina and Nevada have been placed ahead of New Hampshire — the state that has historically held the nation’s first presidential primary.
To mark the occasion, we are holding our first-ever primary calendar draft. If a select group of states is going to vote first, which states should they be? Nathaniel Rakich and Mary Radcliffe join me for this very nerdy (and genuinely fun) exercise in redesigning the presidential primary calendar.

By now, the story of how Graham Platner was recruited to run for Senate is well known. Two Democratic Socialist-aligned operatives, Daniel Moraff and Leanne Fan, set out to find a like-minded candidate to challenge Susan Collins in Maine.
As Platner told Jon Stewart, at the end of July 2025, “some people came to [his] house” who “had been in Maine for a few months working with the AFL-CIO a bunch of labor unions.” They were looking, as he put it, for “a kind of a working-class person on kind of working-class economic policies.”
Over the next few weeks, the recruiters convinced Platner to run, telling him he could secure Bernie Sanders’s endorsement. He announced his candidacy in mid-August and landed that endorsement by Labor Day. Moraff later told The Wall Street Journal that they had not conducted a traditional background check on Platner.
The candidate recruitment process usually unfolds behind the scenes. But given the spectacular way this campaign unraveled, it has become a central part of the Platner postmortem and of the recriminations now unfolding within the Democratic Party.
It has also thrown a spotlight on a much bigger question: How should Democrats try to win back working-class voters? Recruiting candidates like Graham Platner is one approach. But is it the right one?
To explore that question, I turned to Joan C. Williams, author of Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back. Joan is a Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of California Law San Francisco and one of the country’s leading thinkers on class and American politics.
We discuss what Democrats still misunderstand about working-class voters, why working-class values matter more than working-class aesthetics, and what politicians like Andy Beshear and John Ossoff are doing differently.


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.
Back in December, I invited Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution onto the podcast to talk about the developing conflict between the United States and Venezuela. At the time, we were discussing the possibility of being at war with Venezuela by the midterms, and I asked Michael whether it could become the next Iraq. He said no. And he was right.
It turns out I just got the country wrong.
Seven months later, we find ourselves in a quagmire in Iran. Of course, it’s an exaggeration to compare it to Iraq at this point. There’s been no ground invasion, and five months is not nine years. But we are in another war of choice in the Middle East that has not gone as intended.
After a 12-week ceasefire, during which the fighting never entirely stopped, Iran’s attacks on commercial vessels in the Strait of Hormuz prompted the United States to launch what is now a 12-day campaign of strikes. In the latest escalation, Iranian attacks on U.S. bases have killed four American service members and injured more than 100.
So where does the war go from here? What has the United States actually accomplished? And what would success even look like at this point?
To answer those questions, I invited Michael O’Hanlon back onto the podcast. He is the Phil Knight Chair in Defense and Strategy at the Brookings Institution and the author of To Dare Mighty Things: U.S. Defense Strategy Since the Revolution.

Democrats’ messy internal politics are on full display as we enter the final stretch of primary season.
The marquee event is Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary. Over the weekend, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez campaigned across the state with Abdul El-Sayed. Haley Stevens, meanwhile, argued that Sanders was nowhere to be found when she was working with President Obama on the auto bailout, and enters the final weeks of the campaign with a 12-to-1 advantage in television spending.
In Maine, former state Senate president Troy Jackson became the presumptive Democratic nominee to replace Graham Platner on the Senate ballot. A longtime Sanders supporter, Jackson was widely seen as the clearest heir to the movement Platner built before leaving the race.
And on Tuesday, Arizona voters will decide a hotly contested Democratic primary in the 1st Congressional District, one of the most competitive House seats in the country.
On today’s episode, we break down all three contests. We also make sense of President Trump’s primetime address on election security and examine how the White House is trying to shape both the administration of the midterms and public confidence in the results.
Joining me are Mary Radcliffe, head of research at FiftyPlusOne, and Nathaniel Rakich, managing editor of Votebeat.


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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.
A hot new model has entered the villa! (Shout-out to Love Island fans.)
On today’s episode, Geoffrey Skelley of Decision Desk HQ joins me to walk through DDHQ’s new 2026 midterm forecast model, why it gives Democrats the advantage in the House, and why election forecasters disagree so sharply about the size of that advantage.
We also check in on two big upcoming primaries. In Michigan, new and conflicting polling has injected fresh uncertainty into the Democratic Senate primary between Haley Stevens and Abdul El-Sayed. In Arizona, Rep. Andy Biggs appears to be cruising toward the Republican nomination for governor and a general-election matchup against the not-particularly-popular Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs.
Then we turn to two unusual Senate contests in which both parties are scrambling to replace candidates on the ballot this fall. In South Carolina, Republicans are preparing for a new primary following the sudden death of Sen. Lindsey Graham. In Maine, Democrats will choose a replacement nominee at a party convention after Graham Platner withdrew from the race.
Skelley joins me to examine both contests and what history tells us about the prospects for replacement candidates.