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

If the data tells a story, there’s one person you can count on to narrate it. Friend of the pod and chief data reporter at the Financial Times, John Burn-Murdoch, has for years been catching readers’ attention with charts that highlight just how society and politics are changing: social classes stratifying, innumeracy and illiteracy rising, birth rates dropping, gender gaps widening, American life expectancy stalling out.

Lately, his work on economic and social reactions to Trump’s second term have been literally jumping off the page. In a chart showing plummeting European tourism to the United States, Icelandic tourism decreased so much it got cropped off the page. The US economic uncertainty index grew so much it also extended off the axis, dwarfing the great recession and covid pandemic.

So I could think of no one better to talk about some of the ways the data is telling the story of our evolving American and global politics than John Burn-Murdoch himself. He joined me on the latests installment of the GD POLITICS podcast.

This is an audio preview of the full draft, which is available to paid subscribers here.

On Wednesday afternoon, Nate Silver and I went live on Substack to host our first ever 2028 Democratic primary draft. We said it was “way-too-early,” but I’m not sure that’s right. The potential candidates themselves certainly don’t seem to think so. Look at just about any ambitious Democrat and it will be clear that they are making moves: doing arena tours, starting podcasts, showcasing their abilities to “get sh*t done.” So we took the opportunity to put our early assumptions for 2028 on the record.

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

Americans have had a lot to digest politically and economically over the past couple weeks. Trump’s volatile approach to tariffs began basically as soon as he took office, with Canada and Mexico being the first targets, but so-called “Liberation Day” marked the start of something akin to full blown chaos.

It’s one of those times when you want as up-to-date data as possible, and lucky for us, our guest had just that. Kristen Soltis Anderson is a longtime friend of the pod. She’s the founder of Echelon Insights, which works with Republican campaigns and is a contributor to the New York Times and CNN. Her latest verrified voter survey came out of the field this morning, and shows some concerning signs for Republicans on the economy.

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

Nathaniel Rakich, Mary Radcliffe and I say goodbye to FiveThirtyEight (and talk about Gavin Newsom's podcast).

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

We recorded this podcast before markets closed on Monday, but at one point during the day the S&P 500 dipped into bear market territory — 20 percent off its recent high — before rebounding. In the two days following President Trump’s Liberation Day tariff announcement, the markets posted a 10 percent loss, the biggest two-day drop since the Covid crash.

On this episode of the podcast, Elliott Morris and Mary Radcliffe join me to talk about some of the math behind what Trump says he’s doing and how the public is reacting.

In one of the biggest election nights of the year, liberal judge Susan Crawford easily won a state Supreme Court race in Wisconsin and Democrats overperformed by double digits in two Florida congressional races.

Deputy editor of Inside Elections Jacob Rubashkin and political reporter at The 19th Grace Panetta joined me to break down the results.

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

Tuesday’s Wisconsin Supreme Court race serves as a test of how voters in the consummate battleground state are feeling ten weeks into Trump’s second term, and one of the main themes of Trump’s presidency is taking center stage: the role that Elon Musk is playing in government.

The race is nominally nonpartisan, but liberal judge Susan Crawford and conservative judge Brad Schimel have been very clear about where they stand on state and even national politics. At stake is the ideological balance of the state’s court, which flipped to liberal for the first time since 2008 in 2023.

Director of the Marquette Law School Poll Charles Franklin and Political Reporter for CBS58 Milwaukee Emilee Fannon joined me to talk about it all.

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At the start of the year it looked like Canada was getting ready to repeat a political story we’ve seen play out across the globe. After decades-high levels of inflation, amid a shortage of affordable housing and a backlash to liberal immigration policies, the unpopular incumbent, the Liberals, seemed destined for electoral defeat.

But then two things happened: On January 6th, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, boasting a mere 22 percent approval rating, announced he would resign. And two weeks later, President Trump took office, talking about turning Canada into America’s 51st state and threatening many — and then levying some — new tariffs on Canada.

I could think of no one better to talk to about all this than the election forecasters of Canada: Philippe Fournier, Editor-in-Chief of 338Canada and Eric Grenier, author of The Writ.

The video version of the podcast is available to paid subscribers here. Subscribe to GD POLITICS at www.gdpolitics.com and wherever you listen to podcasts!