FiveThirtyEight Politics

With just days until the Iowa caucuses, the crew reacts to a head-to-head debate between former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, as well as a town hall featuring former President Donald Trump.

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The Iowa caucuses are just a week away, and in this installment, the 538 Politics podcast sets its sights on the early states. Galen speaks with celebrated Iowa pollster Ann Selzer about likely caucusgoers' views of the candidates and how things could change in the final week of the campaign. Later in the show, Galen is joined by ABC News reporters Kendall Ross in Iowa, Kelsey Walsh in New Hampshire and Gabriella Abdul-Hakim in South Carolina. They share their insights from months of talking to voters and listening to candidates as they crisscrossed their states.

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The 538 Politics podcast is kicking off the new year with a game of Buy, Sell, Hold. There are a lot of unknowns as we start the year: Who will win the party nominations for president? Will a third party candidate break through? What will come of former president Donald Trump’s legal liability? And ultimately, who will win the White House, the House of Representatives and Senate? There are betting markets for just about all of these unknowns, so Galen asks the crew to make an assessment of the going odds.

They also discuss potential wildcards heading into the new year: What issues might motivate voters? How will congressional dysfunction play out? How about October surprises? 

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Happy holidays, listeners! As we approach the Republican Iowa caucuses, we decided to re-air our audio documentary series, "The Primaries Project." This series originally aired in early 2020 and investigates how our modern primary system came to be, how it has shaped our political landscape, and how it might be improved. This is episode three of three.

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Happy holidays, listeners! As we approach the Republican Iowa caucuses, we decided to re-air our audio documentary series, "The Primaries Project." This series originally aired in early 2020 and investigates how our modern primary system came to be, how it has shaped our political landscape, and how it might be improved. This is episode two of three.

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Happy holidays, listeners! As we approach the Republican Iowa caucuses, we decided to re-air our audio documentary series, "The Primaries Project." This series originally aired in early 2020 and investigates how our modern primary system came to be, how it has shaped our political landscape, and how it might be improved. This is episode one of three.

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In this holiday installment of the 538 Politics podcast, the crew looks back at some of the most important political events of 2023 as well as some of the weirder political stories of the year. They also debate the thorny question of which types of cookies can be considered "Christmas cookies" in a festive edition of "Good or Bad Use of Polling." To wrap it all up, they play "Guess What Americans Think" and guess the answers to polling questions like, "If Santa were a registered voter, which party would he belong to?" 

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On this special reaction edition of the 538 Politics podcast, Galen speaks with Kimberly Wehle, professor of law at the University of Baltimore, and Geoffrey Skelley, senior elections analyst, about the recent ruling from the Colorado Supreme Court that bars Trump from the Colorado Republican primary ballot. They discuss the legal grounding of this ruling, the political reaction and the prospect of the U.S. Supreme Court weighing in.

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The U.S. House adjourned for the holidays last week after voting along party lines to authorize an impeachment inquiry into President Biden. The Senate is delaying its holiday recess as negotiators try to hash out a deal that would include aid to Ukraine and Israel as well as funding for border security and possible changes to asylum law.

In this installment of the 538 Politics podcast, the crew heads to Washington to discuss how Congress is closing out the year and what Americans think about it. They also mark just four weeks until the Iowa caucuses and look at what the data says about how much the polls have historically moved during the final stretch before caucus day.

And they wrap up by taking stock of how likely Americans were to vote in 2023. Since Trump was elected in 2016, the country has been in an era of historically high turnout in elections. Did that continue this year, and does that portend anything for next year?

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In early 2020, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told New York Magazine that, “In any other country [she and President Joe Biden] would not be in the same party.” Yet, by April of that year, after Bernie Sanders dropped out, she “absolutely” threw her support behind Biden, saying “the stakes are too high when it comes to another four years of [former President Donald] Trump.”

Since Trump’s victory in 2016, opposition to the former president has served as one of the strongest organizing principles for the Democratic Party. And that dynamic has likely helped paper over some of the “progressive left vs. establishment” divides that were visible in the 2016 and 2020 primaries.

While the 2024 Democratic primary is essentially uncompetitive, some cracks in that unity have still emerged. For example, since Biden took office, one of his steepest declines in support has been among young voters, a cohort that backed Sanders in 2016 and 2020. Differing views of the current war between Israel and Hamas have further highlighted the generational divide in the party.

In this installment of the 538 Politics podcast, Galen speaks with author Joshua Green about those divides, where they come from and how they may manifest in 2024. Green’s new book is titled, “The Rebels: Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and the Struggle for a New American Politics.”

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