The video version of this podcast is available here.

Last week I had the chance to speak with Republican Senator from Alaska Lisa Murkowski at length. She was candid about many things: Her openness to the idea of leaving the G.O.P, her aversion to bombing Iran, and the safety concerns involved in being a lawmaker during a period of increased political violence.

She also discussed her feelings about Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s performance on the Supreme Court (after voting not to confirm him), her likelihood of supporting the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” and why she thinks the U.S. shouldn’t have closed primaries.

Sen. Murkowski has represented Alaska in the U.S. Senate since 2002 and her new book is called, “Far From Home: An Alaskan Senator Faces the Extreme Climate of Washington, D.C.” Our conversation took place on Thursday, June 19.

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I’m sure you’ve all seen the news about the United States’ attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities over the weekend. It’s a fast moving situation that we are going to talk about on future episodes of this podcast.

It also happens that I wrote an op-ed about presidential politics that is in The New York Times today. I wanted to publish a podcast elaborating on my thinking around the op-ed and that’s what today’s episode is. In a nutshell, it’s about the lessons that can be learned from how Trump ran against his own party and outflanked it from both the right and the left in 2016. By the way, today’s episode was recorded before Saturday’s attack.

To give you a sense of the rest of the week, I also recently recorded an interview with Sen. Lisa Murkowski, which is going to be in your feeds on Tuesday. The first question I asked her was whether she thought the US should bomb Iran and she was candid on that and many other topics.

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

If you find the title of this episode confusing, the cold open should help clear things up. I believe it’s the longest cold open I’ve ever done for a podcast. Enjoy!

On a more serious note, we’ve got an awful lot to talk about today. I had originally planned to open up the mailbag and answer listener questions (which we still do), but before we get to that, Nathaniel Rakich and I talk about some of the news since the last episode.

Last Thursday evening Israel began bombing Iranian military targets with the goal of preventing Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons and the two countries have continued to exchange fire in the days since.

Friday night, a man who’s now in custody shot two Democratic Minnesota lawmakers and their spouses, killing state Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband and wounding state Senator John Hoffman and his wife. Minnesota Governor Tim Walz described the attack as “targeted political violence.”

On Saturday, President Trump hosted a military parade in Washington, DC marking the 250th birthday of the U.S. military, which also happened to be his birthday, and protesters gathered around the country under the banner “No Kings.”

Not that we need anything more to discuss, but today, June 16th also happens to be the 10th anniversary of Trump’s descent down that escalator and entrance into presidential politics. Nathaniel and I bring some data to try to make sense of it all.

Nate Silver and I went live on Substack Thursday afternoon to sort though some of the messy politics of the moment: There are the immigration raids in Los Angeles and the response from protesters and the Trump administration. There’s a competitive Democratic primary for mayor of New York City. Elon Musk seems to be back in the fold after threatening to …

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

The contours of the 2026 midterms are taking shape in House districts across the country. Inside Elections just released their most up to date ratings, so today we spotlight five districts to watch, across Colorado, Maine, New York, Washington and Iowa. Democrats only need to flip three seats in order to gain control of the House, but how deep into Republican territory are they trying to compete?

We also get into last week’s breakup between Donald Trump and Elon Musk. A recent piece in POLITICO argues, based on the polling, that “Musk boasts his own base of support that exists outside traditional partisan boundaries, particularly marked by the parasocial relationship young men have with him. That makes him a danger to the fragile coalition Republicans relied on in 2024.” Is that a good take based on the data?

With me to discuss it all is Jacob Rubashkin, Deputy Editor at Inside Elections.

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

Prepare to get nerdy today. We dig into the most rigorous data available on how different parts of the electorate voted in 2024.

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

What do Americans think about the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA)? And is the acronym pronounced “OH-bah” or “ABBA?”

For our purposes I think we’ll go with “ABBA,” so, will this be a case of The Winner Takes It All? Or will this be Republicans’ Waterloo? (This one’s for you ABBA fans!)

In any case, the House narrowly passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act just before Memorial Day. Senate Republicans now have to figure out what they want to do with it. And while they do that, on today’s podcast we figure out how Americans are reacting to it. We also look at what Americans think of Trump’s broader agenda, much of which is being enacted through executive actions.

We’ve got a lot of polling from our friends at YouGov to help us do that and they’ve also got a new survey out testing Americans’ self-regard. Do Americans think they are trustworthy? Smart? Good at driving? Good at running? And how do the sexes view themselves differently?

Joining me to get into it all is Carl Bialik, US politics editor and VP of data science at YouGov, and Taylor Orth, Director of Survey Data Journalism at YouGov.

I hope everyone had a nice Memorial Day Weekend!

If you’ve paid any attention to politics over the past decade you know that one of the most important ways America’s coalitions have changed is that Democrats have done increasingly well among voters with college degrees, while Republicans have done increasingly well among voters without them. In a country in which 63 percent of people don’t have a degree, that’s a losing proposition for Democrats.

The challenge facing Democrats runs deeper than strictly whether their voters completed a bachelor’s program. We talk about educational attainment so much, in part, because it's easily measured. We collect education data on the census and pollsters routinely ask respondents about it. But often when we talk about the diploma divide, we’re actually talking about something more complicated. We’re talking about class.

Class can shape all kinds of things about ourselves, including – importantly for our purposes – what we value in our leaders and how we want them to solve our problems. That is the topic of the new book by Joan C. Williams, “Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back,” and she’s today’s guest on the podcast.

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