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.

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 the audio and video from live shows like the one above and our upcoming live show on November 3rd.

Today’s episode is a live taping of the podcast with Nate Silver and Clare Malone at the Comedy Cellar in New York City. The video version is available here.

During the taping, we discuss the strategy involved in a government shutdown (it hadn’t happened at the time of the recording, but we predicted that it would come to pass). We also introduce a new segment called, “Hot Take Hat.” There was so much news to discuss that we couldn’t decide which stories to cover, so we left it to chance. As a result, we discuss the NYC mayoral race, gerrymandering, vaccines, Fed independence, and more.

Lastly, we play a game of “Guess Which Comedian Said This.” It was not lost on us that we were recording the podcast in something of a sacred place for comedians, during a time when the government is challenging First Amendment principles. To mark the significance, we compete — along with the audience — to identify which comedian is responsible for some audacious excerpts of political satire.

We wrap up with some very thoughtful questions from members of the audience, ranging from free speech to Trump’s energy policy.

The Left has long claimed the mantle of the party of working people. As recently as last decade, Democrats posted twenty point margins with union households. In the Trump era, the Right has posed a significant challenge to that identity. In 2024, Harris won union households by just 8 points, though as union membership has declined, that may not be the most apt measurement. Lower and middle income people have also shifted decidedly to the right.

The stories that the two parties tell when trying to win over workers have variations, but generally go something like this: American workers have gotten the short end of the stick over the past half-century, as globalization and free trade have taken root, manufacturing has been hollowed out, and wages have stagnated. The Left includes blame for greedy corporations and union busting and the Right includes blame for mass migration and regulation.

The majority of American adults are “working people,” and so there’s plenty of political power in claiming them as core to your coalition. That is the focus of today’s podcast. According to the data, how are workers doing and what do they think of the politicians who say they’re serving them?

With me to discuss is John Lettieri, co-founder and president of the Economic Innovation Group, a bipartisan think tank. They put together plenty of economic research, including a recent poll of American workers, which they did with Echelon Insights.

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.

We’ve got a lot to talk about today. We cover who is actually watching late night TV, Kamala Harris’s new book, 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.

I say we, 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. I imagined that might include episodes where I’d open up the mic and do exactly that … talk to you. I did it a couple times early on, but it’s been a minute and so I want to do it again.

Tentatively I’ll call this the GD Notebook. I’ll open up my notes — books, articles, and the likes — 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 poll, I’ll reach out to the author or talk about it with guests on the podcast, but I read a lot of stuff and we often don’t get to all of it. I constantly have loads of tabs open on my computer with things we didn’t get to. Hopefully we can make good use of them here!

Today we’re mostly going to go through my notebook, but, as a reminder, you can send in questions on the paid subscriber chat and at galen@gdpolitics.com.

When President Trump took office on January 20th, 2025, he said in his inaugural address: “After years and years of illegal and unconstitutional federal efforts to restrict free expression, I also will sign an executive order to immediately stop all government censorship and bring back free speech to America. Never again will the immense power of the state be weaponized to persecute political opponents.”

In just the past week, Trump has called critical television coverage of him “illegal,” and said that, “when 97 percent of the stories are bad about a person, it’s no longer free speech.” He’s also threatened ABC’s chief Washington correspondent to, “go after people like you,” for, “hate speech,” and urged his administration to revoke the broadcast licenses of TV stations that are “against” him. He also filed a $15 billion defamation lawsuit against the New York Times and threatened protesters and left wing groups with racketeering lawsuits.

Additionally, Trump has urged his Attorney General Pam Bondi to target his political foes. For her part, Bondi said in a podcast interview, “There’s free speech, and then there’s hate speech. And there is no place — especially now, especially after what happened to Charlie — in our society.” She went on to say, “We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech.” She later attempted to clarify that she was referring to incitements of violence.

As we discussed on the last podcast, FCC Chair Brendan Carr threatened Disney and ABC’s affiliate stations over Jimmy Kimmel’s recent comments saying, “This is a very, very serious issue right now for Disney. We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” and “These companies can find ways to take action on Kimmel, or there is going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”

The Pentagon has said it will require journalists to sign a pledge refraining from reporting information that isn’t authorized for release, including unclassified information, or risk losing press credentials. And the vice president urged Americans to call the employers of anyone seen celebrating the killing of Charlie Kirk.

The events of the past week add to a long list of moves that already concerned First Amendment defenders, like targeting law firms, museums, academic institutions, and career bureaucrats for expression Trump disagrees with and attempting to criminalize burning the American flag.

On today’s podcast, we make sense of all of this with a longtime defender of the First Amendment, Nadine Strossen. She was the longest-serving president of the ACLU, from 1991 to 2008 and is now a senior fellow at FIRE, the Foundation For Individual Rights And Expression. She is also the author of the 2018 book, “HATE: Why We Should Resist It with Free Speech, Not Censorship” and a professor emerita at New York Law School.

Throughout her career she has defended all manner of expression, ranging from the alt-right in Charlottesville, to free speech on campuses, to pornography, to flag burning, to criticizing the PATRIOT ACT. Perhaps most poignantly, as the daughter of a holocaust survivor, she has spoken in favor of the right of neo-Nazis to march in Skokie, Illinois, a case that predated her at the ACLU.