GD POLITICS

I hope everyone is recovering nicely from their July 4th hangover. At 250 — hell, at 35 — those things aren’t single-day affairs anymore.
Today’s episode is a conversation I had with Adrian Wooldridge about his new book, “The Revolutionary Center: The Lost Genius of Liberalism.” Adrian is the global business columnist at Bloomberg and was previously the political editor at The Economist.
To be honest, I had intended to air this conversation in the run-up to our semiquincentennial. After all, the Declaration of Independence may well be the most famous liberal document ever written.
But as the calendar worked out, our last episode before the Fourth was a paid episode, and I thought this conversation was a worthwhile listen for the wider GD universe. (Although, of course, if you appreciate this podcast, I encourage you to become a paid subscriber👇️) So I’m publishing it now, for folks to chew on as we return from the weekend’s celebrations.
The word “liberal” gets thrown around a lot. It’s used to poke fun at the left (”resistance libs”) or chastise the right (”neolibs”), and in American politics today, it’s not clear what it even means.
Adrian clearly defines liberalism and lays out a forceful case for why it’s a worthwhile worldview today, despite some of its failures.
We talk about who can be a liberal, according to Adrian, both socialists and nationalists, but not populists. We discuss where the ideas came from and how they developed over the centuries, and how liberalism addresses the challenges of today. It was an enlightening (pun intended) conversation, and I hope you appreciate it too.


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Happy 250th birthday, America! To mark the occasion, Gabe Fleisher of Wake Up To Politics joined me to run a full diagnostic on the republic as it wraps up its 250th year.
First up: good data, bad data, or not data? Americans are about as interested in commemorating the country’s 250th birthday as they were in commemorating the bicentennial 50 years ago. But underneath that stable topline is a much more divided country. In 1976, Democrats and Republicans were roughly equally interested in the celebration. Today, Republicans are 33 points likelier than Democrats to say they want to commemorate the occasion.
Then, a look back at a blockbuster Supreme Court term. The justices closed out the term by overturning two precedents: greenlighting presidential removal of independent agency officials in Trump v. Slaughter and lifting limits on party-candidate coordinated spending. They also rejected Trump’s reinterpretation of birthright citizenship. Gabe, who was in the courtroom when NPR briefly “retired” Justice Alito, explains why this is a conservative court but not a MAGA court.
Congress, meanwhile, is on pace to be the least productive in modern history, and yet it just passed the first major housing package in 30 years with veto-proof majorities. Will Trump accept yes for an answer? And will the housing bill become law regardless?
Finally, the latest New York Times polls show Senate races in North Carolina, Maine, Texas, Ohio, Iowa, and Alaska all within the margin of error, even as majorities in nearly every one of those states call the Democratic Party too extreme. And a new Pew typology survey finds that beneath our 50-50 stalemate, Americans hold supermajority positions on issue after issue. We’re emotionally polarized (see the feelings about our semiquincentennial above). Ideologically? Not so much.
I hope everyone has a nice Independence Day. We’ll see you in year 251!

Shortly before we started taping today’s episode, the Supreme Court handed down decisions in a couple of cases we’ve been watching.
In Watson v. RNC, the court ruled that ballots postmarked by Election Day can still be counted after Election Day in states where that is legal. Nathaniel Rakich of Votebeat explains why the ruling preserves the status quo in more than a dozen states and why Donald Trump is unlikely to stop attacking late-arriving mail ballots anytime soon.
We also discuss another pair of decisions involving independent agencies. The court allowed Trump to fire Federal Trade Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter, but said Federal Reserve member Lisa Cook could remain in her job while she challenges her firing. That suggests the court may be willing to expand presidential control over many independent regulators while treating the Fed as a special case.
Then we turn to the Trump administration’s deal with Iran. Mary Radcliffe of FiftyPlusOne walks us through the polling on the agreement, which shows that Americans generally support efforts to end the war, but are much less sure that the deal will actually work. That leads us into a broader conversation about the national political environment, whether the generic ballot has really tightened, and what a new New York Times poll of the Maine Senate race tells us about the race between Graham Platner and Susan Collins.
Finally, in Good Data, Bad Data or Not Data, we look at a Washington Post analysis arguing that prediction markets are well calibrated. The verdict: not so fast.


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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.
As we suggested might happen on Monday’s episode, this week’s primaries in New York City launched a narrative war over the Democratic Party: Is Mamdani now a Democratic kingmaker? Is the socialist left the future of the party? And are we witnessing a Democratic version of the Tea Party?
On today’s episode, Mary Radcliffe of FiftyPlusOne and Nathaniel Rakich of Votebeat join me to debate that last question.
First, we try to define what the Tea Party actually was. Was it an ideological movement aimed at enacting conservative policy on taxes, spending, and health care? Was it simply an anti-establishment backlash? And was the election of Donald Trump the nail in the coffin for the Tea Party or its crowning achievement?
Then we ask whether anything similar is happening now on the left. Nathaniel makes the case that Democrats are seeing the beginnings of a Tea Party-style insurgency. Mary is more skeptical, pointing out that the socialist left remains a relatively small faction of the party.
We also talk about where the comparison may be strongest. The Tea Party’s power was not just that it won primaries. It was that it changed what Republican politicians felt they had to say and do. On the Democratic side, the clearest example may be Israel and Palestine, where candidates backed by pro-Israel groups are facing increasing scrutiny in Democratic primaries.
Give it a listen and let us know in the comments where you come down!

New York City is not America. It is denser, younger, more renter-heavy and more ideologically left than the country as a whole.
But that does not mean its politics are irrelevant to the national Democratic Party. In fact, this week’s congressional primaries in New York may offer a preview of several fights Democrats are likely to have between now and 2028.
On today’s episode of the GD POLITICS podcast, politics writer Michael Lange joins me to make the case that Tuesday’s primaries are, in some ways, a dress rehearsal for the next Democratic presidential primary.
We talk about the battle between socialists and progressives in New York’s 7th Congressional District, where a retiring Nydia Velázquez has opened up one of the youngest and bluest seats in the country. We also discuss the challenge to Rep. Adriano Espaillat in New York’s 13th District, where questions of race, ideology, Israel-Palestine and incumbency are all colliding.
Then we turn to the race to replace Jerry Nadler in New York’s 12th District, one of the best-educated and most politically engaged places in the country, where the politics of artificial intelligence have become central. And we look at Dan Goldman’s primary challenge from Brad Lander in New York’s 10th District, where AIPAC, local political roots and the post-Mamdani left all loom large.
Finally, we head north of the city to New York’s 17th Congressional District, one of the most important battleground seats in the country, where Democrats are deciding what kind of candidate they want to put up against Republican Rep. Mike Lawler.
The big question running through all of this: Are these races revealing where the Democratic Party is headed, or are they mostly telling us about the strange and specific politics of New York?


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