FiveThirtyEight Politics

The crew reacts to Joe Biden's announcement that Kamala Harris will be his running mate.

Joe Biden is expected to announce his running mate this week and the crew discusses the latest speculation over who it might be. They also compare Biden's current standing in the polls to Clinton's standing at this time in 2016 -- her peak of the overall campaign.

After the release of historically bad GDP data, the crew discusses how well economic data can predict the outcome of an election. They also discuss the potential consequences of President Trump casting doubt on the legitimacy of the 2020 election.

Rep. Will Hurd of Texas’s 23rd Congressional District joins the podcast. He is one of only four Republicans in the House still representing a district that Hillary Clinton won in 2016 and he is the only Black Republican in the chamber. He is also retiring at the end of his current term. As he says on the podcast, he is not yet sure whether he will vote for President Trump this fall.

According to the timeframe Biden laid out, he could announce his choice for a running mate as soon as the end of this week. The crew discusses the upsides and downsides of his various choices.

In March, it became clear that states needed to reconfigure in-person voting and significantly scale up mail voting so that Americans could vote during a pandemic. Since then, we’ve seen postponed elections, consolidated polling places, long lines, mail ballots that never reached voters, and long delays in counting those ballots. Will the U.S. be ready in November?

A recent poll showed that the majority of Pennsylvanians think that people in their community secretly support Trump. The crew explains why that is unlikely. They also consider the future of Black politics as politicians from the Civil Rights Era -- like Rep. John Lewis -- leave office.

In recent weeks, public opinion has moved significantly in favor of Black Lives Matter and more people have taken the view that Black people face discrimination in America. But is there public support for policies that could address that discrimination? FiveThirtyEight's Perry Bacon Jr. and political science professor Meredith Conroy discuss what the polls can tell us.

The crew discusses whether Americans and politicians are in agreement on how to respond to the recent surge in coronavirus cases. The also interrogate a lesson that some Democrats took away from the 2016 election -- that the party should focus less on "identity politics."

FiveThirtyEight legal reporter Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux joins Galen Druke to look back at a U.S. Supreme Court term full of consequential cases. They also unpack one the final rulings of the term, which permits prosecutors to subpoena the president's financial records.