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!

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.

Today we’re zooming in on another 2026 battleground state, and this time, fittingly, it’s Alaska. There’s a lot more to this fall’s elections than Mary Peltola’s profanity!

Donald Trump won Alaska by 13 points in 2024. But two years later, Democrats are mounting serious challenges at the top of the ticket.

In the Senate race, Peltola leads Republican incumbent Dan Sullivan by 2.5 points in the polling averages, and Silver Bulletin gives her a 55 percent chance of winning. Their contest is unfolding amid sky-high energy costs, dissatisfaction with the Trump administration, and a fierce debate over Alaska’s fisheries.

The governor’s race is particularly unusual. Candidates are competing to replace term-limited Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy, and while sparse polling and ranked-choice voting make the race difficult to measure, Silver Bulletin gives Democrat Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins an 86 percent chance of winning. It would be the first time since 1998 that Alaska elected a Democratic governor. Kreiss-Tomkins is aided by a fractured Republican field and a ranked-choice voting system that voters may repeal this fall.

Meanwhile, Republican Nick Begich has a 90 percent chance of holding Alaska’s lone House seat, suggesting very divergent preferences across three statewide races.

But we’re not just talking about the horse race. Alaska’s political culture doesn’t map neatly onto the usual red-versus-blue divide. More than 60 percent of its voters are not registered with a political party, rural Alaska often votes Democratic, and moderate Republicans regularly govern alongside Democrats. It is the only state where bipartisan coalitions control both chambers of the legislature.

Joining me from Juneau to talk about it all is James Brooks, statehouse and politics reporter for the Alaska Beacon.

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.

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.

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: