The full episode is available to paid subscribers. Once you become a paid subscriber, you can connect your account to your preferred podcast player here.

Virginia voters approved a gerrymander of their congressional map by a slim margin on Tuesday. As we discussed on Monday, the new map could elect 10 Democrats and just one Republican this fall, replacing the current delegation of six Democrats and five Republicans.

It’s a dramatic turn in the mid-decade redistricting saga that began with Texas’s Republican gerrymander last summer. As things stand, Democrats could end up as the net beneficiaries of an effort initiated by President Trump.

We dig into those results at the top of today’s podcast, then turn to the listener mailbag. We’ve been getting lots of great questions in the paid subscriber chat on Substack at gdpolitics.com. (A reminder to paid subscribers to take advantage of that!). I’ll start a new thread there so you can drop in questions whenever you like.

Today’s questions cover the California governor’s race, whether candidate attractiveness affects election outcomes, that poll suggesting the Democratic Party is less popular than ICE and the GOP, whether MAGA identification has declined, and what to watch in the midterms — especially the Senate. We even get into the Nebraska race, which one listener argues deserves more attention.

Joining me are Mary Radcliffe, head of research at FiftyPlusOne, and Lenny Bronner, senior data scientist at The Washington Post.

Heads up: We’ve got a live show at the Comedy Cellar in New York City with Nate Silver and Clare Malone coming up on May 13. We’ll talk about the midterms and the Trump administration, play some games, and take questions from the audience. Grab a ticket, grab a beer, and come join us!

Virginians are heading to the polls on Tuesday to decide whether to redraw the state’s congressional map, part of Democrats’ response to Republicans’ push for mid-decade redistricting.

If the measure passes, Virginia could go from a delegation of six Democrats and five Republicans to one with 10 Democrats and just one Republican. But that outcome is not yet certain: polling shows a closely divided public.

In Florida, legislators are preparing for a special session next week to decide whether, and how, to redraw that state’s map. Recent Democratic overperformances, combined with a state constitution that bars partisan gerrymandering, make the politics there more complicated.

Once Virginia and Florida settle on their paths forward, we should finally — in the middle of primary season — have a clearer sense of what the 2026 congressional map will look like.

That’s our focus on today’s podcast. We also dig into broader questions around election administration, including Republicans’ push to pass the SAVE America Act, Trump’s executive orders, and decisions still pending at the Supreme Court.

And we round things out with the latest midterm fundraising numbers and last week’s New Jersey special election. Joining me for all of it is Nathaniel Rakich, managing editor of Votebeat.

The full episode is available to paid subscribers. Once you become a paid subscriber, you can connect your account to your preferred podcast player here.

Heads up: We’ve got a live show at the Comedy Cellar in New York City with Nate Silver and Clare Malone coming up on May 13. We’ll talk about the midterms and the Trump administration, play some games, and take questions from the audience. Grab a ticket, grab a beer, and come join us!

Last November, friend of the pod David Byler joined me to argue that, while artificial intelligence was still on the periphery of politics, it wouldn’t stay there for long. The parties, he said, should prepare for disruption.

Less than six months later, it feels almost silly to have ever imagined otherwise. Over the past few months, the Department of Defense has publicly clashed with Anthropic over how its models could be used in war. Anthropic, for its part, developed a model so powerful that it is now back in talks with the Trump administration about how to protect the nation from its own capabilities.

At the same time, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders proposed a national moratorium on data center construction in response to local concerns about energy costs and broader AI skepticism. Just this week, Maine passed the first-ever statewide version of that idea, banning the buildout of large data centers through the end of 2027. Meanwhile, the White House has proposed federal legislation that would preempt such state laws, and 2028 hopefuls are beginning to stake out positions of their own.

AI has officially entered the political mainstream.

To mark its arrival, I invited David Byler back on the podcast. He is the vice president of trends and futures at National Research Group, and together we talk through how AI became a live political issue. We also ask whether the latest examples of AI polling, described in the New York Times op-ed “This Is What Will Ruin Public Opinion Polling for Good,” count as good data, bad data, or not data.