GD POLITICS

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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