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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.”