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Foreign hello and welcome to the GD Politics Podcast. I'm Galen Druck and we've got a lot to talk about. Today we're going to cover who is actually watching late night television, Kamala Harris's new book, which just came out, whether politicians are using AI to do their jobs, whether efforts to reduce partisan animus actually work, and the government's move to cancel a survey measuring how many Americans are going hungry. Now, I say that we are going to cover, but I actually mean me. When I launched this podcast, I said that I wanted to hear directly from you, the listeners, and speak directly to you as well. And I imagine that might include podcasts where I open up the mic and do exactly that. Talk to you. Just me to you. I did it a couple times early on, but it's been a minute and so I want to do it again. And here's how I'm thinking about it. I'll tentatively call this the GD Notebook. I'll open up my notes, books, articles and the like that I've been reading and share them along with some thoughts and answer some of your questions. Often when I read a compelling article or study or poll, I'll reach out to the author or talk about it with guests on this podcast. But I read a lot of stuff and, and we often don't get to all of it. And I constantly have loads of tabs open on my computer with plenty of interesting stuff that we didn't get to. So hopefully we can make good use of some of those tabs here. Today we're mostly gonna go through my notebook, but as a reminder, you can always send in questions for us to discuss on this show. You can reach me through the paid subscriber chatgdpolitics.com you can also send me an email at galendpolitics. Let's start off with a news story from earlier this week. Jimmy Kimmel returned to his show on abc. And the thing that in particular stuck out to me here was a poll from the AP looking at who actually watches late night television. So when ABC and affiliate stations made the decision to preempt Jimmy Kimmel's show, there was conversation about, you know, this was the result of a threat from FCC chair Brendan Carr. Also some commentary about how this could be a business decision by ABC and those affiliate stations because of business pending before the FCC or just Jimmy Kimmel not having particularly good ratings. And I think in some ways it's hard to disentangle the two. But if we're going to talk about business decisions I think it's fair to also look at who the audience is that is being served. And if you read this AP poll, you see that, first of all, a lot of Americans are not watching late night television. And actually, before I even get to the poll, just to put this into Context, during the second quarter of 2025, Jimmy Kimme averaged 1.8 million viewers. You know, that's down significantly over the past decade. But even when things were looking quite a bit better in 2015, he had about two and a half million total viewers. So there's not a ton of people tuning into this. But if we look at the people who are tuning in. So the AP asked, have you watched all or most of a late night talk show within the past month? And overall, only a quarter of Americans said they had. When you look at the partisan breakdown, it's pretty striking. So a third of Democrats said they had watched all or most of a late night talk show within the past month, and just 18% of Republicans. Now, a lot of this stuff gets consumed as clips, not people actually watching the full show. So the AP also asked that question, have you watched a clip from a late night talk or variety show within the past month? Again, the divide between Democrats and Republicans here is pretty striking. 45% of Democrats, nearly half of Democrats said they had watched clips from a late night talk show and just 25% of Republicans. So this is a tricky moment for, well, lots of participants in American media. But when it comes to folks like ABC or CBS or NBC who are making decisions about these late night shows, their audience skews significantly to the left. And so in this situation, there may be some pressure because of FCC business or whatever, or direct pressure from the chair of the fcc that's in line with the Trump administration's priorities. But those aren't the priorities of the audience necessarily. And I think we can look at maybe the Washington Post as an example of what happens when leadership's priorities, partisan priorities, may not align with the audiences. Obviously, Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post, friend of the podcast Nate Silver, mentioned this in a piece that he wrote last week that at the Washington Post's peak during Trump's first term, they had about 50% of the Google traffic that the New York Times had. And the New York Times is huge. So that's pretty good. Today, it's somewhere in the range of just 10%. And so over that period of time, the Washington Post has made changes that are in line with Jeff Bezos's priorities, but not necessarily the priorities of a generally left leaning audience. I don't think there's so much more to talk about here, but just notable that just as there was suggestion that ABC was making a business decision in taking Kimmel off the air, this also may be a business decision putting Jimmy Kimmel back on the air. I want to move on to our next topic as a fledgling politics podcast. I think we are probably not going to get Kamala Harris to do an interview with me in conjunction with her new book 107 Days, but I wanted to read the book nonetheless, and I did so within the past day. I think it came out on maybe Tuesday or Wednesday. Anyway, I read it in less than 24 hours. I actually listened to it and she voices the whole thing. So that was an interesting experience. And I was taking notes in my notes app on my phone as I was listening to it. I took a lot of notes and at this point the 2024 election has been analyzed to death by me and on this podcast and its predecessor, but also in plenty of other books. And so I don't want to belabor these points too much, but I thought that it was interesting and so I'll mention some of my notes as I was going through the book. First of all, I was trying to figure out what the point of the book was. Is this an attempt to memorialize accomplishments and get Kamala Harris's version of history down in a book? Is it preparing Harris to run for a future presidential campaign? And I think at conclusion of the book it is still not clear to me. And I think whether or not she runs in 2028 will depend more on things outside of her control than in her control. So I don't think in reading this book you can get a clear sense or have 100% certainty either way of whether she is running or not running. Another top level takeaway I was thinking about while I was listening to the book is how much of this is an explanation of why Harris lost versus a just sort of narrative TikTok of what was happening behind the scenes on the campaign because it could make a compelling story. It's a bit of both. And how good is her analysis in terms of why she lost? Now this is something that we have talked about plenty, so I don't think we need to belabor the point. But the reason she lost is because Joe Biden was an unpopular president who, well, first chose to run for reelection, a deeply unpopular president, and she was uncapable of or unable or unwilling to significantly differentiate herself from that administration, from his performance. Folks have probably heard some of, some of the drama surrounding her talking about Joe Biden deciding to run for reelection and probably not being up to the task and the like. And there is a good bit of that that's front loaded in the book. A lot of the, I would say back half of the book is more of just a TikTok of what was happening behind the scenes. When it comes to her analysis of maybe what, where she went wrong, I would say that it's probably not as blunt as the part that is critical of Joe Biden and perhaps that is fair. You know, she can leave it to other analysts. And when she, she oftentimes is explaining why she made decisions or whatever, it seems a little bit more like she's defending herself from the left in terms of saying like why I didn't talk more about climate change and I'll bring this up in a second, but she talks a lot about the Israel Gaza conflict and that sort of stuff. But she doesn't really talk all that much about like I could have broken more on this and sort of the policies on cost of living that I should have been sort of frontloading and breaking with Joe Biden on are this or I could have created more of a differentiation on immigration in this way. You don't really get much of that in this book. Although there are points where she brings up some of the stuff on housing and the like where she was trying to differentiate herself with Biden. But to the point about the Israel Gaza conflict, obviously this is not a policy book. But in terms of where she talks about policy for the first fifth of the book, that is the issue on which she talks about policy the most, the war in Gaza. And she's talking about how much she sympathizes with Palestinians and, and goes into things that were happening behind the scenes and meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu and protesters at her rallies. And I was trying to figure out like does she think that this is an important part of the reason why she lost, that there was a significant part of the Democratic Party that didn't want to vote for her or Biden for that matter, because they were upset about the war in Gaza. And at first I got the impression that okay, she does probably think that. But later on in the book she cites accurately a poll from Tufts University that asked young people what they care most about in this election. And she says that the number one issues for young people were the cost of living, cost of housing, cost of health care, getting a good paying job and the like. And that dead last were issues of climate change and Gaza. And so in terms of how much time she spends on the topic of the war in Gaza, it's unclear to me still. Like, maybe this is just something that she really cares about that she wants to get on the record in terms of maybe, maybe wishing she had been more forthcoming, or maybe she's thinking about the future of the Democratic Party and the direction in which the party is going. We've talked about the polling that suggests that within the Democratic Party, support for Israel is down significantly and sympathy for the plight of Palestinians in is up significantly. So maybe she's in part here positioning herself for the future. But all told, I think that was the policy issue that got the most play in this book. Other contenders would be abortion, which I really don't think is a real contender. Cost of living issues she brings up, but not in as sort of concerted of a way. And when she does talk about, you know, I support small businesses and the like, which was a theme in her. In her campaign, she doesn't really talk about why, you know, like she's, I care deeply about small businesses, but you don't hear a sort of backstory of, like, why I care so much about small businesses. Which, you know, the answer could be something, I don't know. This is a campaign response, but the answer could be something like, we have higher rates of entrepreneurship in America. That's what makes us special. Especially amongst the Latino community. There are high rates of entrepreneurship and small business ownership and the like. We don't really hear that. Okay, onto the next topic that I had in my notes, which was the VP selection process. Now, of interest to this podcast, she cites polling that her campaign did behind the scenes once they had narrowed the field down to, I believe, Tim Walsh, Josh Shapiro and Mark Kelly. And that polling suggested that whoever she picked as VP wouldn't change the contours of the race. And I think that backs up what we know academically about the impact that a VP can have on a ticket. She also takes pains to, in particular explain why she didn't pick Josh Shapiro as her running mate. And I think that's in large part because very popular governor of a crucial swing state, that was the obvious pick. And basically what she says is he was a threat to her in some ways, that he wanted to be president too badly, he was overly ambitious, that maybe as a result, it wouldn't be a good sort of companionship as president and VP and the like, you know, which is an interesting reason sort of not to. It seems like she was very focused on the threat that her VP could pose to her, which maybe, maybe says something about the dynamic that she experienced between herself and Biden. I don't want to get too speculative or too gossipy, but it's worth remembering that the person that she did pick, Tim Walsh, did a very bad job in the debate. One of the most high profile sort of moments that the VP engages in and she talks about one of the reasons that she was attracted to him as a candidate is because of how self effacing, self deprecating he was and how he kept saying, you know, I'm bad at, I'm bad at debating. I don't want to be president throughout the interview process. And so again, this takes me back to like, I wonder how much of the dynamics between her and Biden were shaping how she was selecting her vp, which is I think maybe, maybe a fair way to choose a vp, but ultimately landed her with a candidate who, who probably wasn't the, the best person for that slot. She doesn't go that much into why she didn't pick Mark Kelly. She also, though, brings up Gavin Newsom and Pete Buttigieg. Gavin Newsom is mentioned all of once in the entire book. And it's to say that when Biden dropped out of the race and she was making her calls that she tried to get in touch with Gavin Newsom. He said that he was hiking and will call back and never called back. That's the only time he's ever mentioned she was in California politics for a very long time. He's the governor of California. It is curious that he doesn't play a bigger role, that he's not mentioned even more than once. We don't really ever get her thoughts on him. You know, maybe, maybe she's thinking about what it will look like when she and him run in 2028. I don't know. Or maybe there's like a lot going on there that she just didn't want to get into. Who knows? And then there was, of course, the explanation of why she didn't pick Pete Buttigieg, who she says at the start of this whole story narrative about choosing a vp, that he was her first choice. And she says that sort of asking Americans to vote for a ticket with, you know, a woman of color at the top of the ticket and a gay man in the VP slot would have been asking Americans for too much. Now we have polling on this and in fact, we've talked about this polling before. When you ask Americans would you support a qualified candidate from your own party. If they are, list a whole number of different identifiers. If they're a woman, Hispanic, Catholic, black, Jewish, gay, Muslim, atheist, socialist, whatever. Okay, so three quarters of Americans say they would support a qualified gay candidate from their own party. Now, are Americans being honest there? It's hard to say. These speculative polls are oftentimes unreliable. They asked Americans, would you support a qualified candidate from your own party if they've been charged with a felony or convicted of a felony? Less than 30% of Americans say yes in both of those cases. But obviously President Trump was convicted of a felony before he won reelection in 2024, so that speculation is difficult to contend with. But ultimately, it's interesting sort of the way that Kamala Harris relates to America herself and in terms of openness to gay people. And I'm curious if that's true. I think she is maybe a bit more definite in her answer than I would be reflecting on it. And again, here she ultimately settled on a VP candidate who was not particularly adept at managing some of the most high profile tasks of being a VP candidate. A couple more notes here and then we're gonna move on to some more fun and interesting stuff. And this gets to running a national campaign versus running a swing state campaign. Harris frequently says throughout the book that she didn't do something because it would take her away from the swing states. So she says that she didn't attend the Al Smith dinner in New York, which is sort of a roast for Catholic Charities, because she wanted to be in the swing states, that she didn't rebut the the trans ads that Kamala's for. They them Donald Trump is for you on a national level because she was doing so in the swing states. You know, she says that it would be too much to spend an extra day in Texas to do the Joe Rogan podcast, because Texas is in a swing state. She needed to be in the swing states. And I'm kind of torn about this from an analytical perspective because on one hand, I think it misunderstands the degree to which presidential campaigns are now nationalized. And oftentimes even campaigns that are not presidential campaigns are nationalized. And so, so many people are consuming national media and seeing clips in their own social media feeds that come from national media that just focusing on the swing states and maybe smaller market media in those swing states misses opportunities to, well, reach the whole country, but also reach swing state voters through the national media. But also sort of the way that some of this national media sets the conversation for the whole country and trickles down into the vibes of everybody. And perhaps the Trump campaign was more adept at understanding this, trying to sort of shape national coverage, doing all of these podcasts and the like. I don't know. I don't think Joe Rogan doing it or not made the difference in this campaign. But I thought that it was interesting the way she framed sort of prioritizing being in the swing states and foregoing sort of national media moments as a result. It was a little unclear to me whether that was strategically right. The other thing I'll say, though that makes me unsure is that when you look at the data, Harris did significantly better in the swing states compared to the country as a whole, when you look at the shift from 2020 to 2024. So the nation as a whole swung about six points to the right between those two elections, but the swing states only swung about three points to the right between those two Elections. And so whatever Harris was doing in the swing states where she was vigorously contesting the election was working to some extent. She stemmed some of Democrats losses that were more pronounced in places like New York, California, New Jersey, Virginia and the like. And so I think to some extent really focusing on the swing states is strategic. But on the other hand, maybe a little bit missile understands the national media environment that we are in. Lastly, part of the whole focus of 107 days is like we didn't have much time. And it seems like she comes to the conclusion that if they had had more time, she may have been able to win the election. Now, I don't know if this is like if I had had more time, if Joe Biden had decided to not run for reelection and there had been an actual Democratic primary leading up to 2024, or if it's sort of a more abstract, if I had more time, you know, it's not that I was a flawed candidate, it's that the circumstances were bad. I mean, one argument you also heard from people during that campaign is that because the campaign was so short, there wasn't as much time for a full blown backlash to Harris. That, you know, a lot of the, the national excitement to the switch from Biden to Harris was the main, was the main message. And there wasn't a two year long process during which she could be torn down. I don't know how much time ultimately played into all of this. I go back to what I said at the beginning, which is that Biden was deeply unpopular. She didn't differentiate herself from Biden. Okay, wait. And I have, I have one more note here, which is that Kamala does talk about brat in her book and the moment when Charlie XCX says that Kamala is brat, she seems to find a sort of affinity for this term, which she describes brat being edgy, imperfect, confident, and bracing. I have to think that there are enough gay people in Kamala Harris's orbit to know that that's. Well, maybe that's in part what brat is. But brat is if you listen to the lyrics about doing drugs, about partying through a mental breakdown. So you know, it's a. I'll just add that let's move on to something new, something that has not been beat to death, something that I found really interesting when I came across it, and that is whether lawmakers are using AI to do their jobs. So in this we're going to get into whether British lawmakers are using AI to do their jobs, whether U.S. lawmakers are using AI to do their jobs, the staffing differences between British and American lawmakers, how much Americans are using AI in general, and maybe I'll even talk about how I do or don't use AI on this show. Okay, I don't know where I first saw this, but this month an article came out from Pimlico Journal, which is a substack that covers British politics from a rightward bent, and the title of the article was MPs are almost certainly using ChatGPT to generate Commons speeches, and the article reads as follows. In mid August, the Mirror published a story about Mike Reader, the newly elected Labor MP from Northampton south, being spotted using ChatGPT to respond to constituents letters while working on a train. This provoked discussion on whether MPs should be using AI for this type of routine task, with most of the concerns raised touching on privacy issues and laziness. Subsequently, Reeder wrote a pretty reasonable opinion piece of In Politics Home, defending his use of ChatGPT, the article continues. This spurred further debate with the Times, the Times of London publishing an editorial on Friday with a similar view to my own, My own being Pimlico journals sometimes acceptable if responding to emails, not so much if being used in Parliament. The editorial ended with the question what cruel news channel will it be that splices together examples from this synthetic oratory? Okay, so the Times of London poses this question, is somebody going to figure out if members of Parliament are using ChatGPT to write their speeches to Parliament? And so Pimlico Journal does some analysis and looks at words that have shot up in popularity in Parliament since the release of ChatGPT. Here are some examples I rise Today is Not merely AI. All right, and that is the end of today's preview. Head over to GDPolitics.com to become a paid subscriber and hear the full episode. As I mentioned, we look deeper into whether British and American lawmakers are using AI, and also how much Americans themselves are using it to write these days. I do also share my own AI usage for this podcast. On a more serious note, we look at a new study of ways to try to decrease partisan animosity in America. And then lastly, a good data, bad data or not data example that gets to the question of what happens when we stop collecting data. Like I said, head over to GDPolitics.com to become a paid subscriber and catch the whole thing. Paid subscribers get about twice the number of episodes, can join in the paid subscriber chat, and most importantly, keep this podcast going. When you become a subscriber, you can connect your account to wherever you listen to podcasts so you'll never miss an episode. There's a link in the show notes explaining exactly how to do that. Again, head over to gdpolitics. Com. See you there.