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Election Day 2025 is just about upon us. In a matter of hours New York City will elect a new mayor, Virginia and New Jersey will elect new governors, and California will decide whether to gerrymander its congressional maps. Millions of Americans across the country will also cast ballots in local elections.

We’ve got a lot cooking at the GD POLITICS pod, so let me share the game plan. Today’s podcast is a tick tock of what to expect on election night: when the polls close, what races we’ll be watching, what data we’ll have, and what time we might get race calls.

Monday night we have an election eve live show at the Comedy Cellar in New York City. It’s officially sold out and I look forward to seeing some of you there! Paid subscribers can expect to get a recording of that in their feeds Tuesday morning (so smash that paid subscriber button!).

On election night, I’ll be live streaming at gdpolitics.com alongside some of your GD POLITICS faves starting at 7pm Eastern Time – Lenny Bronner, Nathaniel Rakich, Mary Radcliffe, Jacob Rubashkin, with some other guests stopping by. Wednesday morning we’ll have a reaction podcast in the feed.

Hold on to your seats, folks!

Two election week updates to start: First, we have a live show coming up at the Comedy Cellar in New York City with Nate Silver and Clare Malone on election eve, November 3rd. There are a few tickets left, so grab ‘em and join us!

Second, I’ll be live-streaming on election night, November 4th, alongside some of your GD POLITICS faves. Think of this as friends having an election watch party that you’re invited to. Assuming we make it to midnight, it will also be my birthday, so don’t be surprised if you see a glass of wine or birthday shots. Grab your favorite beverage and join us starting at 7pm ET at gdpolitics.com.

I’m first going to apologize to listeners who don’t care about New York City politics, because that’s what today’s entire episode is about. Though I wouldn’t skip just yet; I promise it will be interesting.

For our New York-minded friends (or people who just get a kick out of Democratic Party drama) today is your day! We are just five days out from a New York mayoral election that has been nothing if not attention grabbing, and, in its own special way, reflective of the complicated city the next mayor will govern.

Let’s begin with the spark notes version of the past 8 months…

It all started with incumbent mayor Eric Adams switching his party identification to Independent, acknowledging that his corruption scandals and relationship with President Trump would prevent him from winning renomination in a Democratic primary.

Then, there was the assured primary victory for the also scandal-plagued three term-governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, which, of course, was not assured after all. Thirty-three year old Democratic Socialist assemblyman Zohran Mamdani won the primary by 13 points, after making the cost of living his defining issue.

Cuomo vowed to continue on as an Independent, while the Democratic establishment remained wary of endorsing Mamdani. Mamdani’s past statements about defunding the police, globalizing the intifada, and more – which hadn’t gotten much play during the primary – came to the fore.

But while Mamdani has struggled to reach 50 percent support in the polls, anti-Mamdani forces haven’t had much luck either. The scandals and lack of charisma that plagued Cuomo in the primary, haven’t gone away. Curtis Sliwa, the – perhaps you could say – odd ball Republican candidate, who’s been a debate favorite for his old-school New York zingers, has wallowed in the teens. Though he told the press he’d only drop out if a Mack Truck hit him and he couldn’t be resuscitated in the ICU.

While incumbent mayor Eric Adams did drop out after polling in the high single digits, his endorsement of Cuomo hasn’t made up the difference for Cuomo. Throughout all of this, Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries and New York Governor Kathy Hochul have concluded, like just about everyone, that Mamdani will win the election and that they are better off endorsing.

A similar conclusion about the inevitability of Mamdani from business leaders, online bettors, and political analysts alike hasn’t stopped the candidates from a brawl down the final stretch. For my part, I’ve spent more than one November in Wisconsin, and the political ads in the city right now are next level.

So that gets us to where we are today. To elaborate much more, joining me is Michael Lange, the author of the newsletter “The Narrative Wars”. The big question now facing Mamdani is whether he can win an outright majority of New York City voters. The answer will shape his likely tenure.

We have a live show coming up on November 3rd at the Comedy Cellar in New York City with Nate Silver and Clare Malone. Come join us for a rowdy election eve!

We are one week away from Election Day 2025, so this week we’re zooming in on the biggest contests of the year. Today it’s Virginia, New Jersey, and California. Later in the week we’ll take a detailed political tour of New York City’s vastly different neighborhoods.

In Virginia, Democrat Abigail Spanberger currently leads Republican Winsome Earle-Sears in the race for Governor by an average of 8 points. Underneath that top line number there’s plenty of variation, with recent polls ranging from a 5 point lead to a 13 point lead for Spanberger. The Attorney General’s race, in which Democrat Jay Jones has had to apologize for text messages that promoted political violence, is significantly closer.

Meanwhile in New Jersey, Democrat Mikie Sherill leads Republican Jack Ciattarelli by 6 points on average. Most polls there have shown a mid-single digit race. In the legislatures in both states, Democrats appear assured to maintain their majorities or grow them.

We also take a look at areas of Virginia and New Jersey that could give us and indication of how different parts of the electorate are reacting to Trump 2.0. There are the wealthy Northern Virginia and Northern Jersey suburbs, large Latino communities also in northern Jersey, and large Black communities in Hampton Roads, Virginia.

If you stick around until the end, we also get to the latest Graham Platner polling in Maine.

With me to do it all is Chaz Nuttycombe, executive director of State Navigate, which covers state-level politics around the country from a data perspective, and Mary Radcliffe, who also works at State Navigate and runs the new polling aggregation site FiftyPlusOne.

The full episode is 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.

Shortly after I launched this podcast, I had a guest on who caught folks attention. Her name was Joan C. Williams, a law professor at UC San Francisco, and she joined me to talk about her new book, “Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back.”

She spoke straightforwardly about why the cultural values of America’s liberal elites and working class are different. As she said, working class values reflect working class lives. And she described how a strict adherence to elite values by Liberals creates challenges for a Democratic Party in pursuit of a majority coalition. After all, less than 40 percent of American adults have a college degree.

It turns out that Joan became something of a listener to this GD podcast herself. A few weeks ago, she sent me an email saying that she listened to an episode I did about whether there are electoral advantages to being moderate. She told me she had just written an op-ed in the Boston Globe about what politicos mean when they talk about moderation, and that there are many different types of so-called moderation, not all of which have the same electoral advantages.

I told her to come back on the podcast and talk to me about it and that’s what we’re doing today. And speaking of liberal elitism, Joan joins me from Siena, Italy where she has been writing about class divides from the 13th century and how they relate to our class divides today.

A question that political analysts often ask is whether something is “breaking through.” Is a piece of information reaching the masses? And is it not just the case that everyone knows it, but does everyone know that everyone else knows it too.

Did we all see that Super Bowl ad? Did we all see that political gaffe? Or as today’s guest would put it: Is it common knowledge?

When people know that something is known or believed by others, it can change human behavior. Think about the watershed moment that President Biden’s 2024 debate caused. Polling already showed that a majority of Americans – even a majority of Democrats – believed Biden was too old for the job. The debate didn’t so much change the facts, as it made it obvious that everyone else knew them too.

Or think about the many Democratic voters in the 2020 primary who wanted to vote for the candidate they believed others would vote for. In an instance like that, simply publishing polling results can influence who voters might support.

This is a phenomenon that shapes electoral politics, but it extends well beyond that, to stock market bubbles and bursts and online mob behavior. With me on today’s podcast to break it down is Steven Pinker. He’s a psychology professor at Harvard University and author of many books, the latest of which is, “When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows . . . Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life.”

Today’s episode focuses on something that few Americans and seemingly even few lawmakers in Washington are particularly preoccupied by: the fact that the government is shut down. Given the lack of urgency, how will it actually end?

After that, we have something of a grab bag of topics. We talk about the axis of conflict that Democrats are hoping to wage the midterms on, that video of Democratic candidate for California governor Katie Porter bombing an interview that wasn’t even particularly hostile.

We also look at some polling on free speech and political violence that should give folks cause for optimism, and the legal questions at play in President Trump’s attempts to send the National Guard to American cities.

This is a conversation that Gabe Fleisher and I had last week on Substack Live. Gabe is the author of the newsletter Wake Up To Politics, which he started writing at the age of nine, so he’s got quite a wealth of knowledge.

Relatively little has changed in shutdown negotiations since we chatted, except one note that Trump announced that members of the military will continue being paid despite the shutdown. They otherwise would miss their first paycheck on Wednesday, October 15.

A heads up that this is your last chance to get 20% off an annual subscription to the podcast. Our first-ever discount, offering paid subscriptions for just $5/month, ends at the end of this week.

Paid subscribers get access to a second weekly podcast, access to the paid subscriber chat, and recordings of live shows like our upcoming live show on November 3rd. I hope you’ll join the crew!

We are less than a month away from Election Day 2025 and today we have a primer on the key races to watch.

There are technically elections all over the country, in 32 states, including contests for school board, city council, sheriff and more, plus referenda of all kinds. But the real blockbuster races are the gubernatorial and legislative races in New Jersey and Virginia, the mayoral race in New York City, and the redistricting ballot initiative in California. Call it the revenge of the coasts!

The New York City race, as you might have heard, is a rematch between former governor Andrew Cuomo and state assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, with perennial Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa along for the ride.

In New Jersey, Democrats are starting to get angsty as the governor’s race between Democrat Mikie Sherrill and Republican Jack Ciattarelli looks to be a single digit race, maybe even a low single digit race.

In Virginia, while the governor’s contest looks like an easier bet for Democrats than historically bluer New Jersey, that hasn’t stopped a spate of scandals from disrupting some of the down ballot statewide races.

And lastly, the California fight over redistricting – Prop 50 – is already the third most expensive ballot measure in state history, with $215 million in spending as of the first week of October. The polling looks somewhat positive for Democrats hoping to gerrymander the state, but polling in such an irregular race can be tricky.

With me to dive into all of this is deputy editor of Inside Elections Jacob Rubashkin.

We are currently offering our first-ever discount on paid subscriptions. Right now, an annual subscription is 20% off, meaning you’ll become a paid subscriber for just $5/month. Paid subscribers get access to a second weekly podcast, including recordings of live shows like our upcoming live show on November 3rd.

The government has now been shut down for 6 days and there’s no clear end in sight, let alone any palpable urgency to reach that end. During past government shutdowns, there has at least been the sense that lawmakers are earnestly trying to find a path forward. Why not this time? Perhaps we need not look any further than the polls.

The bulk of polling suggests Americans blame Republicans more than Democrats for the shutdown, so Democrats aren’t feeling pressure to fold. Historical polling also suggests that the party making the demands that provoke the shutdown – in this case Democrats – are eventually seen as responsible and fold after achieving little to no policy concessions. Given that, Republicans probably aren’t feeling the pressure to compromise either.

Today we dig deeper into those surveys and try to get a sense of where things might go from here. We also focus on a couple other polls that have attracted attention recently. (Yes, it’s a polling heavy day, so grab that calculator and put on those stats nerd glasses. I promise it will be fun 🤓)

The New York Times released its first national poll since April, following months of newsworthy developments and political rancor, resulting in… wait for it… no discernible change in how Americans view Trump and Democrats.

There’s also a new poll out of Pennsylvania showing that Democratic Senator John Fetterman is a relatively popular figure in the state. Just one important footnote: he is 20 points underwater with his own party’s voters and 40 points above water with Republicans. So is his approach a roadmap for other Democrats to win over Republican voters or a one way ticket to a primary challenge and an ouster from Washington?

With me to discuss it all are friends of the podcast Mary Radcliffe and Lenny Bronner.