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Democrats are in the midst of an intraparty debate over how to win their way out of the wilderness. There are arguments about ideology, strategy, identity, and more. And while these debates always feel urgent for the party out of power, they are, at the very least, not new.

Parties and politicians have been trying to figure out how to shore up their vulnerabilities, enhance their strengths, and fight another day for just about as long as representative politics have existed.

Today we are going to focus on one such instance. We’re looking back at late-20th-century Nevada and the beginnings of a political machine built by former Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

It’s the subject of a new book by CEO of the Nevada Independent Jon Ralston, titled, “The Game Changer: How Harry Reid Remade the Rules and Showed Democrats How to Fight.”

If you’ve spent time reading think pieces on the internet during the past handful of years, you might have come across the following ideas: first, that American men are suffering from a loneliness epidemic and, second, that conservatives are happier than liberals.

If you aren’t familiar with these takes, then you probably aren’t online enough to experience the sad loneliness of the American male liberal, so please carry on as you were. I joke, I joke.

In any case, these ideas have caught on enough that friend of the pod Lakshya Jain — a machine learning engineer by day and head of political data at The Argument in his spare time — wanted to do more research into what differences actually exist across the political spectrum and between men and women.

In this episode, he breaks down what he found and also gets into his latest research on affordability and whether Americans are lying to pollsters about how much they read.

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.

Depending on who you ask, we’re either living through a moment that feels totally unprecedented or alarmingly familiar.

Today’s guest argues it’s alarmingly familiar: great powers jostling for influence, nationalism on the rise, trade and technology turning into weapons, and festering conflicts with the potential to spiral.

In his new book, “The Coming Storm: Power, Conflict, and Warnings from History,” Yale historian Odd Arne Westad compares today’s geopolitical landscape to the decades leading up to World War I.

A hundred-plus years ago, the world looked modern, interconnected, and — at least to many people — too prosperous and rational for a major war. Then, in a matter of weeks, a localized conflict became a continent-wide crisis that ended in 40 million casualties.

The percentage of people alive today who have experienced great power conflict is vanishingly small, and after 80 years of great power peace, it can be easy to think of the prospect as far-fetched. Westad argues that this, too, may be a similarity to the early 20th century.

Today we talk about those similarities and differences and what lessons we can learn.

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.

On today’s episode, we open up the mailbag for an overdue round of listener questions — and you had some great ones! You asked whether Democrats might be locked out of the California governor’s race, who might win the heated primary in Illinois’ 9th Congressional District, and whether Iowa is actually in play for Democrats.

You also had some more philosophical questions, like whether the Republican and Democratic parties will still exist in 2040 and what strategically is the best path forward for the GOP. Continuing a past theme, you also asked why Zohran Mamdani’s favorability rating is so high and what we expect turnout to look like in 2026.

As a reminder, paid subscribers can share questions in the paid subscriber chat, which we’ll prioritize, and you can also reach me with questions on social media or by email at [email protected].

We are entering our thirteenth day of the war in Iran, and we’ve been getting conflicting signals about how long it might last and what the end goal actually is.

At the start, it seemed the goal was regime change. President Trump called on Iran’s forces to lay down their arms and for civilians to revolt, saying the operation could last four to five weeks.

Since then, Trump has also called for Iran’s unconditional surrender, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio framed the goal of the conflict as destroying Iran’s ballistic missile capabilities, missile production factories, and navy.

On Monday, Trump said the war was ahead of schedule and “very complete, pretty much.” The same day, the Department of War said, “we have only just begun to fight.” On Tuesday, Democratic senators emerged from a briefing telling the press they were concerned about the likelihood of the U.S. putting boots in the ground in Iran.

Meanwhile, the economic repercussions of the conflict and the near closure of the Strait of Hormuz, have rippled across the globe, amping up the stakes of the war.

To borrow an analogy from a friend of the podcast, there is an awful lot of noise surrounding the operation. Today we are going to try to find the signal. Where do things stand? What are the upside and downside risks? And what are the possible outcomes?

Joining me to do that is Mara Karlin, professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. She served in national security roles for six U.S. secretaries of defense and most recently served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for Strategy, Plans, and Capabilities under President Biden.

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

We are officially in the second week of the war with Iran and the fallout is intensifying.

President Trump now says the goal is Iran’s unconditional surrender. Meanwhile, Iran’s clerics have appointed Ali Khamenei’s hardline son as the new Supreme Leader, suggesting surrender is unlikely for now.

Fifteen countries have become involved in the conflict in some way, the number of U.S. service members killed has risen to seven, and the number of deaths in Iran is estimated to be more than 1,200.

Markets have fallen around the world as the likelihood of this being a short, contained operation is fading. Perhaps most notably oil prices have gone vertical. They reached $120 a barrel overnight and were at about $100 a barrel at the time we recorded the podcast.

That compares with $55 a barrel in December and $65 a barrel just before the war. The average price of gas nationally has shot up 50 cents per gallon in just a week and now sits at about $3.50 per gallon.

Last week Congress declined to rein in Trump’s authority in the conflict, but that doesn’t mean the domestic politics of the matter are settled. Not by a long shot. With me to discuss the unfolding politics here at home is Gabe Fleisher, author of the “Wake Up To Politics” newsletter.

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.

The war in Iran has set off a civil war within the Republican Party over whether the military adventurism of Trump’s second term is America first or America last. As one indication, Megyn Kelly kicked off her podcast on Monday (one of the most popular right-wing shows in the country) with withering criticism of Trump’s decision. Her first guest, Marjorie Taylor Greene, suggested it could lead her to stop voting.

On Tuesday, Texas’s incumbent senator, John Cornyn, managed to fight his primary merely to a draw with scandal-plagued Ken Paxton after spending a record $70 million. Further down the ballot, once rising star Rep. Dan Crenshaw lost his primary outright. The tensions within the GOP, at least at the elite level, are already at a rolling boil. So what happens when Trump — a force helping to hold both parties’ coalitions together — leaves the scene?

That is the question I attempted to answer, alongside friends of the podcast Nate Silver and Clare Malone, at a live show Wednesday night at the Comedy Cellar in New York City. Joined by a rowdy, sold-out crowd, we hosted our first-ever 2028 Republican primary draft. We even got a West Village audience to applaud for Tucker Carlson. (If you missed our Democratic primary draft from January, I encourage you to check it out!)

We also discussed the political consequences of the big news stories of the day: the results in Texas on both sides of the aisle, the expanding war in the Middle East, and a torrent of attention-grabbing AI news. Plus, we opened the mics and answered audience questions.

Looking for nerdy yet irreverent coverage of the Texas primaries Tuesday night?! We’ll be live streaming with friends of the pod beginning at 7:30pm ET on March 3rd. Join us at the link here.

We were originally planning on dedicating today’s whole episode to the kickoff of the 2026 primary calendar with Tuesday’s elections in Texas, North Carolina and Arkansas. However, if I’ve learned anything hosting the GD POLITICS podcast, it’s to be flexible — we might end up at war.

The U.S. and Israel struck Iran beginning on Saturday, killing Iran’s supreme leader. Iran responded, attacking Israel, U.S. military assets, and civilian targets in the Gulf States. Hezbollah in Lebanon has also joined the fighting.

As of the time of our recording, the back-and-forth bombing is continuing and there are more questions than answers about what will happen next. Will there be a revolution in Iran? Will it be successful? What would the current regime staying in power look like? How wide could the conflict spread and how long could it last?

I’m sure those are questions we’ll contend with in the future. Today we are going to kick things off with how the American public views the conflict and how politicians are reacting.

Then we will move on to Tuesday’s primaries. The blockbuster races are the Republican and Democratic Senate primaries in Texas. I’ve covered a lot of these races in my day and I can’t remember the last time I saw polling as contradictory as what we’re seeing in the race between Jasmine Crockett and James Talarico in Texas. We’ll also touch on some of the House primaries worth keeping an eye on Tuesday night.

Joining me is director of data at FiftyPlusOne, Mary Radcliffe, and deputy editor of Inside Elections, Jacob Rubashkin.

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

President Trump offered strikingly few proposals in the longest State of the Union address ever delivered and what he did offer was not particularly heavy on legislation or ambition. Instead, he leaned into conflict with the Democrats in the chamber and highlighted stories from guests in the audience that often included graphic details. Friends of the podcast Mary Radcliffe and Nathaniel Rakich joined this throwback late-night reaction episode to discuss this and much more.

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

Today’s episode turned out to be serendipitous. Last Friday, I’d been planning to speak with Harvard economist Jason Furman, Obama’s top economic advisor, about the recent flood of economic data: the jobs report and revisions for the past year, inflation data, GDP growth, trade balances, consumer sentiment, and more.

There was one piece of data I did not expect we’d be getting in advance of our conversation: the Supreme Court’s decision on President Trump’s emergency tariffs. Friday morning, the Court struck them down in a 6-3 decision, concluding that the power to enact such broad tariffs lies with Congress.

So, on today’s episode, we begin with the latest tariff news and then widen the lens to the broader economy, including Furman’s suggestion that we may have achieved the first indisputable “soft landing” in postwar American history: bringing inflation under control without triggering a recession.

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