The video version of this podcast is available to paid subscribers here.

The gerrymandering wars are continuing apace. Texas Democratic legislators are returning to their state this week after leaving in order to block a Republican attempt to redraw the state’s congressional maps. Their return means Texas Republicans can move forward with their gerrymandered maps, which aim to add five Republicans to the state’s congressional ranks.

California Governor Gavin Newsom has kicked off his own retaliatory gambit, attempting to add five seats to the Democratic roster in his state, with new maps that will be considered by the California legislature this week and – if all goes to plan – considered by California voters in a referendum this fall.

Speaking of gambits, Ipsos announced that it is partnering with Stanford to create AI survey respondents that are twinned with real people. Is this “Good Data, Bad Data or Not Data?” And will survey respondents be the first casualties of the great AI job displacement?

Also, as we sat down to record Monday morning, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and European leaders were meeting with President Trump to present their vision for how to bring about an end to the war in Ukraine, after Trump seemed to side with Russian President Vladimir Putin last Friday.

Trump’s relationship with Russia was a highly scrutinized part of his first term, but what do Americans think now? And how involved do they want the US to be in ending the war in Ukraine?

With me to discuss it all are two dear friends of the pod, Mary Radcliffe and Nathaniel Rakich.

The full episode is available to paid subscribers. Once you become a paid subscriber, you can connect your account to your preferred podcast player by following the directions here.

As students begin to head back to school, American higher education is in its most fraught position in recent memory. Most prominent among the challenges is President Trump’s pressure campaign against elite universities.

There have been federal funding freezes linked to accusations that schools haven’t done enough to stem anti-semitism and remove race considerations from admissions. There have also been cuts to scientific research, roadblocks for international student visas, and new limits on federal student loans.

There are also broader concerns about higher education that predate Trump or have little to do with him: The rising cost of tuition, concerns about the return on investment, and the growing gender imbalance amongst those who graduate. Women now receive about 60 percent of bachelor’s degrees in the U.S.

To top it all off, there are emerging questions about whether artificial intelligence will shrink the availability of entry level jobs that a degree prepares many students for.

On today’s episode we get into as many of these challenges as possible with Preston Cooper. He’s an economist and senior fellow at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute. He’s done extensive research into the value proposition of American higher education, and has estimated the return on investment of 53,000 different degree and certificate programs across the country.

Low-key, the whole political scene is such an L right now. Everyone’s either gaslighting, rage farming, or displaying NPC behavior. American politics is just vibe-check after vibe-check, but it’s mostly giving flop era with zero accountability.

If you’re confused as to why I — a millennial podcaster — am writing like a Gen Z TikToker, it’s because today we are talking about how the Internet shapes our language and in doing so also shapes our culture and politics. (Also, yes, in case you were wondering, ChatGPT wrote that.)

Today, the spread of ideas happens in large part on social media, where what content gets promoted or demoted or even what words we are allowed to use is largely determined by algorithms. This has created a new dynamic where algorithms are increasingly influencing how we communicate.

A simple example might be the emergence of the word “unalive,” because social media platforms banned content about suicide, but it goes well beyond that.

This is the argument Adam Aleksic lays out in his new book, “Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language.” Adam is a linguist known online as “Etymology Nerd.”

The full episode is available to paid subscribers. Once you become a paid subscriber, you can connect your account to your preferred podcast player by following the directions here.

We’ve got lots of election updates for you today. It’s that time of the cycle when potential candidates are increasingly making moves. As you probably heard, Kamala Harris is not running for governor of California, which has opened up a crowded primary there.

Longtime New York Congressman Jerry Nadler got a primary challenger from a 26-year old who is making Nadler’s old age a prime issue. The blockbuster Texas Senate primary is continuing to heat up on both sides.

And, of course, the Texas legislature has released its newly gerrymandered maps, with the goal of adding to five seats to Republicans’ congressional numbers in what will likely be a tough midterm for the party.

Oh, and lest we forget, we are three months away from Election Day 2025, which will feature statewide elections in New Jersey and Virginia.

Today we talk about all that and focus in particular on the Senate. Inside Elections just released its overview for the Senate in 2026 and lucky for us our guest today is the deputy editor of Inside Elections, Jacob Rubashkin.

On Friday morning the Bureau of Labor Statistics released its jobs numbers for July. The nation provisionally added 73,000 jobs, shy of the 100,000 jobs expected. It wasn’t particularly good news.

More newsworthy, though, were the downward revisions for May and June. What had initially been reported as just shy of 150,000 jobs added each month, turned out to be closer to just 15,000 jobs per month. Quite plainly bad news.

The Trump administration first went to work spinning the numbers as the result of seasonal adjustments. By the afternoon, President Trump claimed on social media that the numbers were manipulated for political reasons and said that he’d directed his team to fire the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Erika McEntarfer.

I probably don’t need to tell you, dear listener, that this raises red flags. If you listen to this podcast, it’s probably because – in addition to finding me charming (lol) – you value what data can tell us about the world as it is, not the world as we might wish it to be.

For now, the acting director of the BLS is William Wiatrowski, the former deputy director. But the administration has said they’ll replace him within a matter of days and the question now is whether that new person might apply pressure within the bureau to make economic data look more like the president wishes it to be.

That’s what we discuss on today’s podcast and we’ve got an all star lineup to do it. Joining me is economics department chair at George Washington University Tara Sinclair. She’s been a visiting scholar at the St. Louis and Atlanta Fed banks, a technical advisor at the Bureau of Labor statistics, and founding chief economist at the job search site Indeed. Also with us is Ben Casselman, the chief economics correspondent at the New York Times, who worked with me at FiveThirtyEight back in the day.

The full episode and video are available to paid subscribers. Once you become a paid subscriber, you can connect your account to your preferred podcast player by following the directions here.

Today we are opening up the mailbag and answering some of your questions!

I want to start with a reminder of how you can get in touch to submit your questions. First, there’s the paid subscriber chat that you get access to when you become a paid subscriber to the podcast. I’ll prioritize the questions in there. You can also get in touch on X or Bluesky and you can reach out at galen@gdpolitics.com.

On today’s episode there are questions about public opinion on the war in Gaza, which actually coincided with some new polling out this week. There are questions about the youth vote, as well as President Trump’s conflict with American universities.

Someone wanted to know if voters would be willing to elect a gay president and also what happened to Fivey Fox, the FiveThirtyEight mascot. Those were two separate questions, although Fivey Fox would make a great candidate if you ask me.

There was one question about why Trump often deflects questions by punting for specifically “two weeks.” Is that how long it takes people to forget about a story?

We got questions about the midterms and elections this fall, but we’re doing an episode on that soon, so I’m going to save those.

With me to help answer your questions is my dear friend and political data extraordinaire Lenny Bronner. He’s a senior data scientist at the Washington Post.

The video version of this podcast is available to paid subscribers here.

The last time I spoke with today’s guest it was late September of 2021 and I started the podcast by citing recent FBI crime data: “The murder rate increased by 30 percent from 2019 to 2020 meaning 4,900 more people were killed in homicides in 2020 than the year prior. That amounts to the largest single year increase since records began in 1960.”

Today the story is very different. Data from the first half of the year suggests that the U.S. is on track to have the largest one-year drop in murder on record for the third straight year. The absolute numbers are also remarkable. Los Angeles, Baltimore and Detroit have all recorded the fewest murders at this point in the year since the mid-1960s. San Francisco has recorded the fewest murders ever and so has New York City (spare one year, 2017). Violent crime more broadly and property crime are also at or near historic lows.

It’s a major success story that has already attracted competing explanations and ideological debate. It has also gone largely unnoticed by Americans. Sixty-four percent say there is more crime now than there was last year, according to Gallup. Although that’s a noticeable drop from 2023, when 77 percent said there was more crime, it still leaves the majority of Americans with the wrong impression.

With me to talk about it all is Jeff Asher. He’s worked as a data analyst for the New Orleans police department and the CIA. He’s also the co-founder of AH Datalytics and writes about crime data at Jeff-alytics on Substack.

The full episode and video are available to paid subscribers. Once you become a paid subscriber, you can connect your account to your preferred podcast player by following the directions here.

A year ago, this week began with President Joe Biden announcing that he was withdrawing from the 2024 election. The decision came about three weeks after his mess of a debate performance that set off a revolt within the Democratic Party. By July 23, 2024, Kamala Harris had secured endorsements from enough delegates to clinch the Democratic nomination.

We all know now how the story ended, and looking at the data after the fact, the result doesn’t seem particularly surprising. No incumbent ever won re-election with an approval rating as bad as Biden’s. The number of Americans saying that the country was headed in the wrong direction was around all-time highs. And on the two biggest issues Americans were concerned about, inflation and immigration, Americans preferred Donald Trump.

That gives us some sense of why the election shook out the way it did, but those numbers don’t explain everything. For example, why did Biden decide to run for re-election in the first place? Or frankly, why did Donald Trump himself run for a rare non-consecutive term. How did Biden and Harris decide how to address Americans’ biggest concerns? And why the lack of daylight after Harris took the reins?

Today, with the help of reporters Josh Dawsey and Tyler Pager, we go behind the scenes of the 2024 campaign. Josh is a political investigative reporter at the Wall Street Journal and Tyler is a White House Correspondent for the New York Times. Their new book is called, “2024: How Trump Retook the White House and Democrats Lost America.”