GD POLITICS

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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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.

Some of the episodes that have gotten the strongest response since launching GD POLITICS have been about politics outside the United States — the United Kingdom, Canada, Japan, and Ireland.
I’m not entirely sure why. Maybe it’s because international politics is an underserved beat in American media. Maybe people are exhausted by a decade of Trump-dominated news, but still enjoy following politics, making a trip abroad a welcome change of pace. Or maybe my own curiosity comes through in those conversations. I’ve found that when I’m genuinely excited to learn about something, it usually makes for a better show. Or perhaps, more cynically, it’s nice to hear that other countries’ politics are messed up too. We in America are not alone.
Whatever the reason, it’s something that I want to keep doing, and it’s what we’re doing today, because there’s been some big election news across the pond lately.
Last week, French right-wing populist Marine Le Pen was cleared to run for president in next year’s election after a court shortened her five-year ban on running for office for misusing European Union funds. The same day, she announced her candidacy.
In the United Kingdom, Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced his resignation as prime minister late last month. Nominations are currently open to replace him as Labour leader, and only one candidate has emerged: former mayor of Manchester Andy Burnham.
If he remains uncontested, he could be declared leader of the party as soon as this Friday and become prime minister the following Monday. This is all happening just two years after Labour won the third-largest majority in the party’s history.
With me to make sense of it all, and to meander into conversations about the World Cup, NATO, and air conditioning, is our European correspondent, Lenny Bronner.


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.
We’ve gotten some dramatic updates since the last time we discussed the state of the 2026 midterms. Chief among them is, of course, that Graham Platner announced he’ll drop out of the Maine Senate race after he was accused of rape. He denies the allegations.
The Maine Democratic Party now has until July 27 to replace him on the ballot. It plans on hosting a convention of about 600 delegates made up of local party officials from around the state. The party’s executive director suggested candidates may need to collect signatures from voters in order to be eligible at the convention.
On today’s episode, election forecasters Lakshya Jain of The Argument and Zachary Donnini of VoteHub join me to discuss how Platner’s departure will shake up the fight for control of the Senate. Both of their forecasts suggest it will improve Democrats’ odds in Maine, but that may not be enough to make them favorites to control the chamber.
Maine also isn’t the only must-win Senate seat for Democrats that’s recently been in flux. In Michigan, state Sen. Mallory McMorrow dropped out of the Democratic primary last Sunday, leaving a two-person race between establishment-backed Haley Stevens and progressive-backed Abdul El-Sayed. They faced off in a debate this week and will face off on the ballot next month.
We discuss the dynamics of that race and the ideological divides within the party more broadly. We also ask what lessons Democrats — both progressives and the establishment — can learn from what just happened in Maine.

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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