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Heads up: We’re hosting our first-ever virtual happy hour for paid subscribers on Tuesday, October 6, at 8 p.m. ET at gdpolitics.com. Special guests Mary Radcliffe and Nathaniel Rakich will join me to answer your questions live while we sip an adult beverage or two. To join the fun, become a paid subscriber here.
Make sure to mark your calendar. I look forward to seeing you there!
Today we have a sneak preview for you all. Dear listeners, you are the first to hear the results of friend of the pod Lakshya Jain’s latest polling for The Argument.
Democrats lead by 6 points among registered voters and 9 points among likely voters. That advantage is broadly in line with the polling averages and, if accurate, would amount to a wave on par with the 2006 election.
Lakshya estimates that roughly 70 percent of Democrats’ gains come from voters switching their support between 2024 and 2026, while 30 percent come from turnout — Trump voters staying home as Harris voters continue to show up.
That raises the question nagging pollsters and election watchers alike: If the polls are wrong this cycle, where are they going astray?
Lakshya’s biggest concern is that Trump voters who answer polls may be more willing to defect than otherwise similar Trump voters who don’t respond. That kind of nonresponse bias can’t necessarily be corrected by weighting a poll to reflect the right demographic or partisan mix. It could be particularly consequential in states with large populations of white voters without college degrees, such as Iowa and Ohio.
We also dig into the issues shaping the election. The economy remains voters’ top concern, but corruption now slightly outranks immigration. And The Argument’s foreign policy polling finds an electorate deeply skeptical of military intervention, with the war in Iran even less popular than the war in Iraq.
Joining me to talk about all that and much more is Lakshya Jain, head of political data at The Argument and founder of Split Ticket.


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We have so much to get to on today’s episode!
We are long overdue to answer your burning electoral questions. You wanted to know about the state of the Senate race in South Carolina, whether President Trump’s approval rating has reached its floor, whether candidates are debating less, and much more.
We’re also going to do something we haven’t done in a minute: rank the competitive Senate seats by how likely they are to flip in November. To help with that endeavor, we just got new statewide polling from The New York Times in Maine, Michigan, and New Hampshire. We’ll size up the polls showing Susan Collins ahead in Maine and Abdul El-Sayed ahead in Michigan.
That probably would have been enough for one episode, but on Wednesday night, The New York Times published a report about Mary Peltola’s alleged behind-the-scenes behavior on the campaign trail and in her congressional office. TL;DR: The report says she makes really b****y comments in private despite her affable public persona. The more serious allegation is that she shoved a staffer, which her campaign disputes.
Joining me to discuss it all are Mary Radcliffe, head of research at FiftyPlusOne, and Lenny Bronner, head of the data outfit Broome Street Labs.
For those who want a visual aid during our Senate-seat flippability ranking segment, I’m dropping Mary and Lenny’s rankings below the paywall:

Today we’re zooming in on the midterm races in Texas. We started our 2026 tour of the states in Georgia. If you haven’t listened to that episode yet, go check it out!
If Georgia has become a secondary concern for the parties this cycle, it’s because redder states have upstaged it and Texas is the star of the whole show.
In the race for Senate, Democrat James Talarico and Republican Ken Paxton aren’t just making Texas look like a highly competitive state. They’re making it look like Democrats are favored. Talarico currently leads in the polling averages by three points, and Paxton hasn’t led in the average since the conclusion of the primary in May.
In the race for governor, Republican Greg Abbott is favored and leads Democrat Gina Hinojosa by three points on average, though it’s certainly a closer race than Republicans would have imagined two years ago, when Trump won the state by 14 points and Abbott was sitting at a net approval rating of plus 20 percentage points.
In the House, Texas steals the show again. It was ground zero for the redistricting wars, with Republicans redrawing the map to give themselves five pickup opportunities. That now looks overly optimistic.
Even downballot races are attracting national attention. The Republican nominee for railroad commissioner, Bo French, prompted Karl Rove to endorse his Democratic opponent after his racist posts on Twitter, bemoaning the presence of South Asian students celebrating at a UT Austin Longhorns game.
With me to talk about it all are Gabby Birenbaum, Washington correspondent for The Texas Tribune, and James Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project at UT Austin, where he directs the project’s polling.


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.
As Election Day approaches, we’re zooming in on some of the states shaping this cycle with the reporters who know them best. First up: Georgia. The Senate race has slipped somewhat from the national spotlight, but there’s still plenty of action in the races for governor and the state House.
Jon Ossoff began the cycle as the only Democratic senator seeking reelection in a state Trump won in 2024. He now leads Republican Mike Collins in current polling averages, while Collins’s campaign has faced an ethics investigation and other controversies. We look at how the race got here and why Ossoff’s growing national profile has stirred talk about 2028, even though he says he isn’t running.
Then there’s the governor’s race, which pits former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms against Republican healthcare executive Rick Jackson. Bottoms is emphasizing affordability and her Georgia roots, while Jackson is presenting himself as a political outsider after spending more than $108 million of his own money during the primary.
There’s plenty happening down the ballot, too. Democrats hope to flip the state House, while the fight over Georgia’s political maps is far from settled. Republican leaders shelved a redistricting push this summer, but Democrats warn that it could return after the election.
To sort through it all, I’m joined by the hosts of the Politically Georgia podcast: Tia Mitchell, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Washington bureau chief, and Greg Bluestein, the newspaper’s chief political reporter.

A dam of pent-up concern over AI safety burst this past week. It started with a warning from AI researcher Jacob Coxon, who resigned from Anthropic and wrote on X: “Do not underestimate the power of this technology. These will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources.”
He continued: “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”
Since then, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has outlined a plan to slow the technology’s development and give safety measures time to catch up. He also warned that, within six months to a year, swarms of AI agents could take over the entire internet. Sam Altman and Elon Musk both expressed support for Amodei’s warning and proposed approach.
Politicians are also taking notice and calling for regulation. The most forceful proposals have come from Democrats, though not exclusively. Sens. John Thune, Amy Klobuchar and Ted Cruz are reportedly working on AI-safety legislation that could be introduced as soon as this week.
Bernie Sanders has called on President Trump to pursue an AI agreement with China modeled on the nuclear arms agreements reached by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. At a fundraiser, former President Barack Obama urged Democrats to “aggressively develop political and governing agendas to prioritize the issue in the coming years,” according to The New York Times.
For his part, Trump wrote Monday on Truth Social: “The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT.” He continued: “There is a SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers, and the only one that is happy about it is China. WHOEVER WINS AI, WINS!”
Joining me today to discuss whether AI is going to kill us all — or, at the very least, how the threat that it could is ricocheting through American politics — are two sharp thinkers on AI. David Byler is a pollster and vice president at National Research Group. He writes the newsletter “Real Research on Artificial Intelligence.” Mary Radcliffe is head of research at FiftyPlusOne.


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