Talkin‘ Politics & Religion Without Killin‘ Each Other

For ten years, Pete Wehner's email subject line for every new outrage was "No bottom means no bottom." Now he and Jon Rauch think they may have found one.

Jonathan Rauch and Peter Wehner join Corey to talk about their New York Times essay, "Trump Has Finally Lost the Plot." They lay out where Trump succeeded, where his effort to remake American society failed, and why Minneapolis, the courts, and his falling approval numbers made the difference. Jon stayed for some bonus time to talk about when to keep a hard conversation going and when to walk away.

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Key takeaways

• Rauch and Wehner put Trump's agenda into three buckets: lowering the country's norms, running the government as a family business (Max Weber's "patrimonialism"), and using federal power to rewire civil society. He mostly succeeded at the first two and failed at the third.
• They credit the people of Minneapolis, the lower courts, and approval ratings in the 30s with forcing the administration to retreat.
• Drawing on a sermon by Rabbi Michael Holtzman, Rauch says walking away from someone is sometimes fine. Walking away with contempt is the problem.

About Jonathan Rauch

Jonathan Rauch is a senior fellow in the Governance Studies program at the Brookings Institute, a contributing writer at the New York Times and The Atlantic, and the author of The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth.

About Peter Wehner

Peter Wehner is a senior fellow at The Trinity Forum and a contributing Opinion writer at The New York Times and The Atlantic. He served in the Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush administrations and is the author of The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump.

Links

• "Trump Has Finally Lost the Plot," The New York Times: www.nytimes.com/2026/09/19/opinion/trump-vance-turning-point-minneapolis.html

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Turns out there's a bottom after all.

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Everyone says the polls blew it. Carl Allen says they didn't, and his research shows candidates averaging 49% or higher in well-polled races have won 98% of the time since 2004. Then we go race by race: Texas, Ohio, Maine, and two red states that could shock everyone on election night.

Recorded live on Substack, this conversation with data analyst Carl Allen starts with why polls aren't predictions and ends with a tour of the 2026 Senate map, with real poll averages and prediction market odds pulled up as we talked. Along the way, Carl explains why a one-point lead can be safer than a three-point lead, and why undecided voters in Minnesota aren't the same as undecided voters in Ohio.

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Key takeaways

• Polls estimate a candidate's current support, not the final margin. When late deciders break heavily one way, as they did for David Crowley in Wisconsin's governor primary, that isn't a poll error.
• Watch the 50% line, not the spread. A candidate near 50% has little room to be overtaken, no matter how many voters are undecided.
• Undecided voters aren't a monolith. That's why prediction markets give a small Democratic lead in Minnesota 90% odds while a similar lead in Texas gets about 60%.
• Carl's sleeper races are Kansas and Nebraska. If Democrats have a strong night, he expects those two to move together.

About Carl Allen

Carl Allen is a researcher and analyst of sports and political data and the author of The Polls Weren't Wrong (CRC Press, 2024). His research focuses on inefficiencies in political betting markets and improving polling methods, and his background includes quantitative analysis for University of Louisville Baseball and MLB data work for Stats Perform.

Links

• The Polls Weren't Wrong: www.routledge.com/The-Polls-Werent-Wrong/Allen/p/book/9781032483023
• Carl Allen on Substack and Threads: @RealCarlAllen

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Polls measure support. Elections count votes. Know the difference.

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Joan Blades helped launch MoveOn. Jacob Hess grew up a conservative kid in Utah. Their friendship is the argument.

Joan Blades, co-founder of MoveOn and Living Room Conversations, and Jacob Hess of the Deseret News join Corey to talk about what happens when political opposites actually sit down together. They cover MoveOn's 1998 start as a one-sentence petition, why these conversations feel scary before they feel fun, and how local pride could rebuild trust in our elections.

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✅ Invite one friend who votes differently to a Living Room Conversation: livingroomconversations.org

Key takeaways

• Hess traces his turn to a graduate school computer lab, where a classmate held him after he learned his brother was being sent home to die. After that, the culture war rhetoric about "dangerous" people stopped making sense.
• Hess argues dialogue shouldn't ban persuasion, because people with conviction end up feeling they must leave it at the door. Blades says curiosity and listening build the relationship that makes honest grappling possible.
• Hess frames this work as public health, since chronic anger is chronic stress. Blades adds that if we're in a loneliness epidemic, human relationships are the obvious remedy.
• Blades is organizing locally around a principle from Braver Angels' cross-partisan work: voting should be easy, cheating should be hard. Local pride in how elections work, she says, is the path to national trust.

About Joan Blades

Joan Blades is a co-founder of Living Room Conversations, MoveOn, and MomsRising. A mediator and attorney by training, she co-authored The Custom-Fit Workplace and The Motherhood Manifesto.

About Jacob Hess

Jacob Hess writes for the Deseret News and co-authored You're Not as Crazy as I Thought (But You're Still Wrong) with Phil Neisser. A former board member of the National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation, he teaches mindfulness and researches long-term healing from depression. His upcoming book is Recovering Hope.

Links

• Living Room Conversations: livingroomconversations.org
• Trustworthy Elections Initiative: ncdd.org/trustworthy-elections.html
• Braver Angels Trustworthy Elections report: braverangels.org/trustworthy-elections
• Jacob Hess, Deseret News: www.deseret.com/authors/jacob-hess
• Jacob Hess on Substack: publishpeace.net

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Partners

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Scary in line. Worth the ride.

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"Woke 1 was crazy," AOC said on national TV, and then she laughed. Corey wants to know what that laugh leaves out.

This morning, Corey published a new essay on Substack about what the woke era actually cost: friendships, careers, invitations that stopped coming. It's also about the friends who stayed close anyway, across real disagreement. This episode, Corey reads it to you himself.

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Links and Resources

• Read the original essay on Substack: Yeah, Woke 1 Was Crazy

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Clarity, charity, and conviction can live in the same room. Yes, really.

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Credentials used to be enough. Rachel Kleinfeld and Renée DiResta on what earns trust now.

Rachel Kleinfeld of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and Renée DiResta of Georgetown University's McCourt School of Public Policy join Corey to talk about their new paper, "How to Engage With New Media: A Strategic Guide for Nonprofit Organizations," co-authored with Margot Treadwell. The conversation moves from an institution caught flat-footed when a researcher becomes a target, to why a big following no longer guarantees reach, to how hard disagreements go better when nobody fears being screenshotted.

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Key takeaways

• Kleinfeld says academic credentials and a nice institutional home no longer confer legitimacy. Authenticity and trust do, and they come from building a community that listens.
• The paper cites Meta data showing 41% of posts on the average Facebook feed come from recommended content unconnected to people the user follows. DiResta explains why that means a large following no longer guarantees reach.
• The paper's four questions come before any posting: who the audience is, what the mission is, which gatekeepers shape the field, and how to create content. Kleinfeld says audiences should be sorted by values and worldview, not demographics.
• DiResta finds hard conversations work best in private group chats where no one fears being screenshotted. Kleinfeld says the place to start is common values.

About Rachel Kleinfeld

Rachel Kleinfeld is a senior fellow in the Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where she advises governments, philanthropists, and activists on how democracies make major social change. Raised in a log house on a dirt road in Fairbanks, Alaska, she earned her BA at Yale and her graduate degrees at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar.

About Renée DiResta

Renée DiResta is an associate research professor at Georgetown University's McCourt School of Public Policy and a contributing editor at Lawfare. She is the author of "Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality" and was formerly research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory.

Links

• "How to Engage with New Media: A Strategic Guide for Nonprofit Organizations": carnegieendowment.org/research/2026/08/nonprofit-organizations-how-to-engage-social-media-new-media-strategy
• "For Expertise to Matter, Nonpartisan Institutions Need New Communications Strategies": carnegieendowment.org/research/2025/09/communications-social-media-nonprofit-institutions-new-media-environment
• Rachel Kleinfeld on Substack: rachelkleinfeld.substack.com
• Renée DiResta: reneediresta.com

Connect with us

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Partners

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Expertise still matters. Trust is what makes people listen to it.

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What happens when the people who read your writing talk back?

A couple weeks ago, The Dispatch published an essay Corey wrote about his hometown of Freehold, New Jersey, growing older alongside his friends from high school, and what it means to lose someone who isn't gone. This episode, recorded live on Substack, Corey reads it himself and reacts to comments in real time on Substack Live as well as some that came in at The Dispatch, including one from a stranger that turns into a pretty candid moment.

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Links and Resources

• Read the original essay at The Dispatch: "Whatever Happened to Freehold, New Jersey?" - thedispatch.com/article/freehold-new-jersey-springsteen-politics

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Some things deserve disagreement. Few deserve losing a friend over.

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Mike Madrid on why both parties are running on empty, and what's actually filling the vacuum.

Mike Madrid, author of The Latino Century and co-founder of the Lincoln Project, joins Corey to argue that neither party is being reshaped so much as replaced. The conversation moves from a 13,000-person Texas town that could decide the midterms to what it costs a person to spend a career in gladiator politics, and why Madrid traded that fight for painting, pilgrimages, and personal writing.

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Key takeaways

• Madrid argues both parties are "zombie parties," hollow shells running on inertia while voters increasingly organize around issues instead of labels.
• Beeville, Texas, a 70% Hispanic town that went 70% for Trump, is why Madrid calls it the most important town in America for the midterms.
• State Rep. James Talarico is connecting with Latino voters by framing politics as class, not identity: the working class had the American dream stolen from them.
• After years of "gladiator politics," Madrid stepped back from the fight and now spends his time writing, painting, and teaching, calling it work that's better for his soul.

About Mike Madrid

Mike Madrid is a longtime Latino GOP political consultant and co-founder of the Lincoln Project. He's the author of The Latino Century: How America's Largest Minority Is Transforming Democracy, and co-hosts the Latino Vote Podcast with Chuck Rocha. He writes The Great Transformation on Substack, where most of his reporting and essays now live, and this fall he's teaching courses built around his book at USC and UC Irvine.

Links

• "The Latino Century" by Mike Madrid: simonandschuster.com/books/The-Latino-Century/Mike-Madrid/9781668015278
• The Great Transformation on Substack: greattransformation.substack.com

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Partners

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The parties aren't just dying. Something else is already replacing them.

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Two megaphones, two drinks, one bar. Corey quits talking about talking and just gets to the talkin'.

Second edition of "To the Republic... To the Pub." Corey sits down with his buddy Chip, a Tea Party guy since the '70s, and it turns into a real fight: Trump's second term, JD Vance, ICE and the Home Depot raids, and whether bipartisanship even means anything anymore. Not talking about people we disagree with. Talking with them.

FOR THE RECORD: Biden's Last Two Years vs. Trump's First 20 Months

• Jobs: averaged 216,000/month in 2023 and 168,000/month in 2024 (BLS, revised). Under Trump, growth has slowed sharply, roughly 716,000 jobs added total from January 2025 through June 2026, versus 2 million over Biden's final 17 months.
• Inflation: fell steadily under Biden, from a 4.1% average in 2023 to 2.9% by December 2024. Under Trump it's climbed back to 3.4% for the 12 months ending July 2026.
• GDP: grew 2.9% in 2023 and 2.8% in 2024. Grew 2.1% in 2025, Trump's first year, and slowed to 1.5% in Q2 2026.
• Stock market: the S&P 500 gained roughly 53% and the Dow roughly 31% combined over 2023 to 2024. Since Trump's inauguration, the S&P is up about 26.5% and the Dow about 21%.
• Consumer sentiment (University of Michigan index): rose from 69.7 to 74.0 between December 2023 and December 2024. Fell to a near-record low of 44.8 in May 2026 and sat around 52 as of August.

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Pull up a stool. Folks we disagree with? It's more fun to talk to 'em than to talk about 'em.

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A newspaper editor from East Tennessee on why Dolly Parton was one of the last people almost everyone agreed on, and what that says about faith, place, and the work of editing well.

Michael Reneau, executive editor at The Dispatch, joins Corey to talk about growing up 50 miles from where Dolly Parton was raised, and what her death revealed about a country that still finds a handful of people impossible to dislike. The conversation moves from Appalachia and Hurricane Helene to Bryan College, Flannery O'Connor, and the hardest thing Michael has ever watched his parents live through.

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Key takeaways

• Dolly Parton's death pulled praise from across the political spectrum, and Michael sees that as a clue about what Appalachia's isolation and hardship actually produced: solidarity, not the caricature.
• Editing longer-form work, learned in part from mentor Marvin Olasky, means being ruthless about finding a story's essence, and Michael treats AI strictly as a tool, never as a substitute for that judgment.
• The formative event of Michael's faith was watching his parents grieve his infant sister's death and hold onto their belief anyway, not any theological argument he later studied.

About Michael Reneau

Michael Reneau is executive editor at The Dispatch, where he oversees editing across the newsroom. Before joining The Dispatch in 2022, he was editor of World Magazine, and prior to that spent several years as editor and writer for an award-winning daily newspaper in East Tennessee. He lives in Greeneville, Tennessee, with his wife and four kids.

Links

• The Dispatch: thedispatch.com
• Michael's tribute to Dolly Parton: thedispatch.com/article/dolly-parton-tennessee-music-philanthropy

Connect with us

• Substack: coreysnathan.substack.com
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Partners

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Nobody agrees on much these days. Dolly was the exception.

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A friend's Facebook post asks who's afraid of the truth. Corey wonders if he's who she means.

A couple weeks ago, The Fulcrum published an essay Corey wrote about an old friend's social media post, and what it stirred up about the walls we build online without meaning to. This episode, Corey reads it to you himself.

Calls to Action

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Links and Resources

• Read the original essay at The Fulcrum: Walling In, Walling Out
• Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone
• The Village Square: villagesquare.us

Connect with Us

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Our Partners

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Clarity, charity, and conviction can live in the same room. Yes, really.

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