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A
So the last time we did a mailbag episode, we got a question from somebody about whether or not we were going to change the theme music. So I ended up asking listeners to send in because I had said earlier on in the process or something like that that I would consider changing the theme music if people didn't like it, whatever. So I, I asked the listeners, you know, let me know, do you like the theme music? And the conclusion was overwhelming. GD Politics podcast listeners like the current theme music.
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B
I'm glad that my view on this is at the pulse of the people.
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A
You're, you're such a man of the people, Lenny Brauner I that's what I always say. You know, as a resident Austrian, you really have your finger on the pulse of the median American voter.
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B
The median American GE Politics listener.
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C
I think that's pretty far from the median American voter.
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B
Yeah.
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A
I mean, I'm going to argue with that. And with that, here it is, the intro music for the GD Politics podcast and we're sticking to it. Hello and welcome to the GD Politics Podcast. I'm Galen Dreep. If everything is going to plan, I am currently in Japan with my family. As I mentioned on the last podcast, I, I'll be back in person on Monday, March 30, and until then, we've got some stellar pre recorded episodes for you. So we're recording this on Thursday, March 12th. I'll take a moment to just say, wow, wasn't that crazy what happened over the weekend? A game changer, you might even say. Okay, now that we've, now that we've covered the news of the day, we can get back to the matter at hand, which is a mailbag episode. It's been a minute since I've sorted the mail and you all had lots of fantastic projects questions. As a reminder, paid subscribers can send in questions in the paid subscriber chat and we'll try to prioritize those questions. You can also reach me on social media and by email@galendpolitics.com so today we're going to talk about the governor's race in California, the election in Illinois's ninth, expectations for the upcoming midterms, Zoran Mundani's favorability rating, and much more. And here with me to answer your questions is Lenny Brauner, senior data scientist at the Washington Post. Welcome Lenny.
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B
It's great to be back.
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A
Also here with us is Mary Radcliffe, head of research at 51. Welcome, Mary.
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C
Always good to be here, Galen. Thanks for having me.
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A
It's always exciting to be in the future. Do you have any thoughts on the crazy events of the past weekend?
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C
I just can't believe that Trump said that.
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A
It's insane. Like, or actually it's not insane. It's the calmest thing he's ever said. It was so crazy. It was so even keel, so measured. It was crazy. Yeah. Lenny, what's your takeaway? Can we officially call this a game changer?
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B
Absolutely. It's a realignment of sorts.
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C
It truly was the day that Trump became the president.
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A
It was the. It was the day that Trump became okay. Although now, like, I'm just worried about what will have happened over the weekend and whether all of that sounds insensitive. And if it did sound insensitive, I am very sorry. In any case, back to back to real life Thursday, March 12, we got a lot of questions to cover and, and like I said, they're fantastic. So keep sending them in. We love answering your questions. We're going to start with a question from Joe, who gets right to the heart of the matter. Joe writes, could there be a world in which Democratic votes are so split in the California governor's race that two Republicans make it to the general election? And just an aside here, California has a top two system or a jungle primary, as we like to call it, where Republicans, Democrats, Independents, whatever, all run in the same primary and then the top vote getters move on to the general election. So Joe says polling generally has the two Republicans with the highest percentages and very split for the Democrats. When should we start seeing movement in Democrats dropping from the race if we believe there will be consolidation? I believe it was the head of the state Democratic Party who told candidates to get out if there was no viable option for them to win. But will that only give them resolve to stay in as people seeking political office tend to have a more inflated ego? So, Mary, why don't we start with you? What would you tell Joe?
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C
I would tell Joe, yes, there is a chance that Democrats could be locked out of the top of the ticket in California, but I don't see it as super likely. Here's a couple reasons why in the latest polls, what we are actually seeing on the Republican side is that we are seeing Republican consolidation for Steve Hilton in particular. Chad Bianco has fallen to 11% of the vote share in, in the most recent polling that we have. If Chad bianco falls to 11% and Steve Hilton consolidates more of the Republican vote, he's pulling at like 18, 16, 18, something like that. It's pretty Likely that one of the Democrats is ahead of Bianco. My guess is it's Stier or Swalwell, both of whom seem to have been rising recently. There's an outside chance it could be Katie Porter. But like, the other thing I would say is a lot of this depends on which candidates are included in the polls that we look at, because it's true that there's, like, some extraneous candidates for the Democrats. There's also, like, a whole bunch more Republican candidates that pollsters generally aren't asking about. Ppic, the Public Policy Institute of California, does include those candidates on their surveys, and they're finding these extraneous GOP candidates pulling around 5 to 10% of the vote. The, like, extraneous Democratic candidates are pulling less than 20% of the vote in all the surveys. How much depends on how many of them pollsters put on their polls. So I actually think this is maybe a little overwrought. Even though, yes, it's a possibility. I would say it's probably not a probability.
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A
Yeah. And there's time. This primary is June 2, so Democrats will have some time to consolidate, I guess, their support.
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C
Yeah, that's true. I'm not quite sure when ballots will go out in California. I seem to recall California ballots being mailed out fairly early ahead of the primary. So while there is some time, you know, voters will start getting ballots relatively soon.
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A
All right, Lenny, former California resident.
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C
I'm a former California resident.
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A
Oh, you're both former California residents. Wow. I didn't realize I was in the presence of such California power.
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C
Well, we both left.
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A
Lenny, what do you think?
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B
I totally agree with Mary. I think it is theoretically possible. We've seen it happen the other way a few times in the past where Republicans were locked out. Obviously, it would be surprising if Democrats got locked out. I think it's possible, but not super likely. The party has not really been able to sort of coalesce around candidates. They were unable to endorse anyone at the state convention because no one received more than 60% of the vote at the convention, which would have been necessary for an endorsement, which is what partially caused this situation. I would sort of look out for what happens sort of in late, later this month, late March, early April. We're going to get fundraising numbers at some point. That'll be sort of a good indication. Parties can often use those as sort of justifications for forcing out candidates that are less prolific at raising money, though obviously in California there is a lot of money to be raised for these candidates. And so a lot of them will probably be able. Would theoretically be able to sort of continue funding their campaign based on the money that they raise. But at least it'll give sort of an indication for what who voters and donors are coalescing around. Um, beyond what the polls are saying. I expect we'll get a few more sort of statewide polls. As Mary said, there has been recent movement in the polls, and sort of getting more of that polling in will also give us a better and clearer picture. And then, you know, we're expecting endorsements at some point. Um, you know, obviously the party's not going to be endorsing anyone, but, you know, major unions, for example, will be. And I think that'll be another reason why I think Democrats will end up coalescing around, you know, three or four of these candidates, which should put at least one of them over the top.
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A
Who's it going to be? Who's the Democrat that's going to make it into the general election?
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B
Lenny, if I were to guess, I'd say Swalwell, like gun to my head.
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A
Okay. All right. All right. Mary, are you on board with that?
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C
Yes. Swalwell or Steyer, I think, are the two that. That have the best opportunity here.
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A
Okay, let's move on to a question from James, who, instead of looking forward in the primary calendar, wants to look backwards. He says, I would love if you guys went over the conclusions of the Texas primary and what this may mean for the rest of. I heard that Talarico performed better in white liberal areas and Hispanic areas like West Texas, but Crockett did better with traditional Democratic voters, like older black voters. Is this true? I like hearing how demographics intersect with segments of the population and chances of victory. I also like hearing about that, James. Lenny, take it away. You did a lot of work on this in the lead up to the Texas primary and during.
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B
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think, and specifically based on this question, that James is more interested in hearing about the Democratic primary. So that is sort of the numbers that I. That I pulled. Talarico did better in wider areas of Texas, in particular, sort of wider liberal areas of Texas. There are some estimates, sort of using demographic data and using precinct data that, for example, he ended up getting around between 60 and 70% of the vote in sort of the white liberal areas of Austin. He also won Hispanic voters probably by less, interestingly enough. And you know, we talked about this on Tuesday, we can get good estimates for how he probably performed amongst Hispanic voters in the Rio Grande Valley, for example. We can Take a look at Starr County. Starr county is 96% Hispanic and Talarico won it by 33 percentage points. But I would caveat that that's sort of not an estimate that we could then apply to the rest of the state because demographic groups vote differently when they live in more diverse areas than when they vote when they live sort of only amongst themselves. But based on precinct results, we can also see that Talarico won the more Hispanic areas of Houston, for example. So he did sort of win Hispanic voters. It seems Crockett, like the question asked, did better amongst black voters. You can really see that when you take a look at just the county level map. East Texas generally has more black voters than West Texas. That is where Crockett did best, also in her home area, home region of Dallas. But a good example there would be to take a look at like Jefferson county, for example, which has the highest percentage of black voters in Texas. And it's also one of the counties that she did best.
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A
James asks what this may mean for the rest of the country and it may mean absolutely nothing. This is a Democratic primary in Texas that we might not be able to extrapolate to any other states. But do you. Are there areas where we can.
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B
If you want to put really, I don't know, blue colored glasses on or whatever, you could say that this is good for Democrats because it shows that, you know, they're able to win back some Hispanic voters that they may have lost in the last two presidential elections. I would sort of be careful drawing these conclusions because people that vote in primaries are a very strange and self selecting group. It is not sort of an average voter that votes in a primary. There were some indications that people thought might show that that is not as good for Democrats. For example, if there would have been a large undervote in the, in the Senate primary compared to sort of more down ballot races, which is something we often see especially in the Rio Grande Valley, where, you know, the people there are more likely to vote in very local races, but not so likely to vote in the primary for like the top ballot races. But we didn't see as strong of an indication of that as maybe a lot of us expected. Which again, if you really want to interpret this as sort of good for Democrats, that would be a good sign for them.
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A
Wait, hold on, Letty. I just want to make sure I got this right. You're saying that in the Rio Grande Valley it's the case that you'll have more people voting in lower down on the ballot races than in, say, Senate or gubernatorial primaries.
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B
Yes.
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C
Yeah. You saw that in this, in this cycle in, in the Rio Grande Valley. I believe every county had undervote at the top of the ticket for the Senate primary. More people voted in their House races than in their Senate races.
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B
You know, politics is way more local in that part of the United States than in other parts of the United States. People are more likely to know who they're sheriff is, for example, or their House member and care a little bit less about who their senator is. It's, you know, in some ways it's sort of a throwback to a maybe previous era of American politics. A little bit more than sort of the rest of the United States.
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C
I want to throw in one more tidbit from Texas that I found interesting and again, really focusing, actually, this is not on the Democratic side. This is both primaries, just total turnout. One thing that I that caught my eye in an analysis from CBS News was that turnout in majority Latino counties was up around 37% compared to recent primaries. And in non majority Latino counties it was up around 33%. So a little bit higher increase in turnout in majority Latino counties. And the reason I flag that is that it's consistent with patterns we saw in the 2025 elections in New Jersey in particular, that we saw larger turnout increases in majority Latino areas than we did in areas that are not majority Latino. So I just want to flag that as potentially, because it's happened twice, potentially something to keep an eye on. It is true that those majority of Latino areas are starting from a lower baseline. Right. Like in general have lower turnout than other areas. So that may be part of what's going on here, but just something to keep watching as these primaries unfold, if we can see a consistent pattern here.
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A
Yeah, I also want to say, I don't know if James was asking if this primary means something about intra party Democratic politics for the rest of the country or not, but as we discussed at the time, there are not big ideological differences between James Talarico and Jasmine Crockett. So to the extent that you could say one part of the party is ascendant or on the decline or whatever, I don't really think you can say that from this primary. But what you can say is whether you make them explicit or not, I think identity politics do matter. We saw a big racial divide in how Texans voted. I mean, people don't always vote along racial lines, but clearly in this Democratic primary they did. And as we look forward to 2028, and I mean, maybe less to a lesser extent, 2026 because there will be fewer high pitched battles over the identity of the Democratic Party in a midterm year. But as we look forward to 2028, I think we can continue to expect that to be a feature in intraparty debates for the Democratic Party.
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B
Yeah, I'll say that this has been sort of the through line in a lot of recent Democratic primaries. To the degree that the deciding cleavage and the Republican primary is often education, the deciding cleavage on the Democratic side is often race and identity.
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A
All right, so let's move on to a related question. Lexin asks, what do you think about Josh Barris argument that politicians, specifically Talarico can win over skeptics by apologizing for past comments like Zoran Mandani did, and that a similar approach might have helped Kamala Is there research on how voters perceive flip flopping versus sincere changes in views? Does anyone have the have the research handy?
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C
I looked so hard for polling on this and I didn't find anything. But my instinct is that voters don't trust politicians. That's period, period. And so when politicians do things that seem untrustworthy, like changing your position on something or apologizing for whatever, I think to some extent voters are just like, okay, whatever, I don't trust you. I would say though, I mean, I think that there's maybe some different kind of grace given to politicians that are relatively new to the scene. I'm thinking about Graham Platner in Maine, for example, who had a series of various controversies and went and made an apology. And you see him leading that Democratic primary now. And what you see from online commentary, which of course is not real life, but is some indication of where, where some people sit is a lot of voters saying like, yeah, I get it, he did some dumb stuff when he was young and he's grown and changed and it's nice to hear someone say that out loud. So maybe there's some benefit for someone who's relatively new on the scene. I don't know that voters would give that same kind of grace to like a long standing politician who had a similar controversy as Grant Platner.
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A
Yeah, I mean we saw Gavin Newsom make some pivots ideologically or on in particular social, cultural policy early on in 2025 when he was talking to Charlie Kirk and Steve Bannon and the likes and he seemed to be largely lampooned online. Again, you said it's not real life and I tend to agree. So it's hard for me to know if voters would have the same reaction. I would say, you know, Occam's razor says, choose the more popular policy. Like, if you're on the wrong side of public opinion and you're in a competitive race, maybe pivot. You know, that takes its own kind of courage sometimes. And I think there are ways. I mean, actually looking back on it, there are ways that you can explain evolutions in policy positions that will sometimes make a lot of sense to voters. We had, we saw a lot of Democratic voters do this on same sex marriage, for example. Right.
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C
And Democratic politicians.
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A
Yeah, yeah. Sorry, did I say Democratic voters? I meant Democratic politicians in real time. We saw, like, Joe Biden, say, actually in the middle of this competitive 20, 2012 election, I support same sex marriage. And then Obama ended up doing the same thing. And if people feel like it makes sense, then they're probably more likely to go along for the ride. Kamala Harris was mentioned in this question. You know, I think it helps to be a good politician to start with, which means you are able to perform authenticity. I think authenticity is still a performance. Like, I don't think Zoran Mandani is a happy go lucky guy every single day of his life, but when he's in front of cameras, he seems eager beaver ready to lead the city, always happy, always smiling, always wearing a suit. And that seems authentically him. That is a performance. You know, Obama's performance of authenticity is also a performance. I kind of think Donald Trump performance of authenticity is also a performance. But Kamala Harris doesn't perform authenticity particularly well. And so I think that voters would give her less grace in this arena because some of that already seems strained.
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B
Yeah, you just said something that I wanted to raise too. And I mean, there's obviously a lot of other things that flow into this, some of them gendered, for example. But I think there are some politicians that are just better at this than others. I mean, Joe Biden was in Senate for a really long time where politics, especially politics and Democratic party changed a lot since the 1970s to, you know, 2020. And he had the miraculous knack of always being in the center of the Democratic Party, no matter where the Democratic Party went. And so very clearly, he was able to change his opinion multiple times on a number of issues throughout his political career. And while it damaged him sometimes, it clearly didn't damage him enough for him to not be able to be elected president. So I think he was probably particularly talented at this kind of game. There are other politicians like you mentioned, for example, Harris, who may not be as good at that and sort of. I think Mamdani is very good, though I will say, and maybe this is a bit more editorializing than I usually do, but I don't think Mamdani won over his skeptics by apologizing. I don't think he won over his skeptics at all. There were just fewer skeptics and most people realized. And I don't think the apologizing was for the skeptics. The apologizing was for the media. So they would stop sort of haranguing him about these issues. He was very much on message during the campaign and only wanted to talk about the things that he wanted to talk about and used the apologizing as a way to stop questions being asked about issues that he didn't want to talk about. So, you know, that is, I think, a very tactically savvy thing for him to have done. But I just don't think the apologizing actually sort of helped him win over anyone who didn't like him in the first place.
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C
No, it's on some level, it's a little pro forma. Right. Like, oh, yeah, okay, I have to go do an apology.
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A
Yeah. Lenny, I wonder how what you're saying about Zoran Mamdani is or isn't applicable to Talarico as this question references. Because, you know, he's getting some negative. Talarico, some negative attention for his position on trans issues, trans teens in particular. And that doesn't seem like the kind of area where he would just apologize for having position and try to sort of pivot in a different direction. What he's saying at the moment is more like, why are you so obsessed with trans people? The only minority ruining the country are billionaires, which is more doubling down on the issue as opposed to apologizing. But I'm curious for your thoughts.
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B
Yeah, I think Telarico will have a harder time at doing exactly the sort of, I guess, the Mamdani playbook. Mamdani really was very focused on affordability. That's the only thing he wanted to run on. He very much didn't want to run on any of the identity politics related stuff that people tried to bring up during his campaign. Tall Rico, on the other hand, sort of has based his entire campaign about his Persona as his Christian pastor, this background. And it's clearly very much tied up with his progressive views. I mean, that's how he talks about his progressive views as coming from that background. And so since that is part of the appeal that he's been running on during the primary. I think it'll just be a lot harder for him to do what Mamdani did. That being said, if he's a talented politician, he might find a different way of sort of avoiding those pitfalls. It doesn't have to be exactly what Zaramdani did.
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A
I want to mention one more pivot alert, which is I believe this past week AOC pivoted to a position of Medicare for all who want it, not Medicare for all, period. Inclusive of abolishing private insurance, which in lay language it might be a public option. And so we'll see how her base, her supporters go along with that. I tend to think that's not going to create problems for her and she's pivoting to a more popular position, and so that's probably good politics seems like
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C
a pretty minor policy change in in
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B
some ways she may also get attacked from the very far left for that, which is another thing that might work in her favor.
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A
Yeah, yeah, there you go. Okay, next question. Ryan It's a brief one. Ryan says thoughts about Illinois's ninth question mark. And that's the end of today's preview. Head over to GDPolitics.com to become a paid subscriber and catch the full episode. We spent an hour answering listeners questions as Ryan asked. We talked about the Democratic primary in Illinois's 9th congressional district, which is shaping up to be something of a civil war for the party. We also talked about projections for turnout in 2026 and whether Iowa is in play for Democrats. One listener asked us to put on our GOP strategist hats and devise the smartest path forward for the party electorally. We also talked about why Zoran Mamdani is the most popular politician in New York and whether a new party will supplant one of the major parties by 2040. We covered a lot in the hour, and yes, we had a crystal ball for that last one. Head over to GDPolitics.com to become a paid subscriber and catch the whole episode. And paid subscribers get about twice the number of episodes. And most importantly, keep this independent podcast going strong 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 how. Again, head over to gdpolitics. Com. See you there.