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.

On today’s episode, we open up the mailbag for an overdue round of listener questions — and you had some great ones! You asked whether Democrats might be locked out of the California governor’s race, who might win the heated primary in Illinois’ 9th Congressional District, and whether Iowa is actually in play for Democrats.

You also had some more philosophical questions, like whether the Republican and Democratic parties will still exist in 2040 and what strategically is the best path forward for the GOP. Continuing a past theme, you also asked why Zohran Mamdani’s favorability rating is so high and what we expect turnout to look like in 2026.

As a reminder, paid subscribers can share questions in the paid subscriber chat, which we’ll prioritize, and you can also reach me with questions on social media or by email at galen@gdpolitics.com.

We are entering our thirteenth day of the war in Iran, and we’ve been getting conflicting signals about how long it might last and what the end goal actually is.

At the start, it seemed the goal was regime change. President Trump called on Iran’s forces to lay down their arms and for civilians to revolt, saying the operation could last four to five weeks.

Since then, Trump has also called for Iran’s unconditional surrender, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio framed the goal of the conflict as destroying Iran’s ballistic missile capabilities, missile production factories, and navy.

On Monday, Trump said the war was ahead of schedule and “very complete, pretty much.” The same day, the Department of War said, “we have only just begun to fight.” On Tuesday, Democratic senators emerged from a briefing telling the press they were concerned about the likelihood of the U.S. putting boots in the ground in Iran.

Meanwhile, the economic repercussions of the conflict and the near closure of the Strait of Hormuz, have rippled across the globe, amping up the stakes of the war.

To borrow an analogy from a friend of the podcast, there is an awful lot of noise surrounding the operation. Today we are going to try to find the signal. Where do things stand? What are the upside and downside risks? And what are the possible outcomes?

Joining me to do that is Mara Karlin, professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. She served in national security roles for six U.S. secretaries of defense and most recently served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for Strategy, Plans, and Capabilities under President Biden.

We are officially in the second week of the war with Iran and the fallout is intensifying.

President Trump now says the goal is Iran’s unconditional surrender. Meanwhile, Iran’s clerics have appointed Ali Khamenei’s hardline son as the new Supreme Leader, suggesting surrender is unlikely for now.

Fifteen countries have become involved in the conflict in some way, the number of U.S. service members killed has risen to seven, and the number of deaths in Iran is estimated to be more than 1,200.

Markets have fallen around the world as the likelihood of this being a short, contained operation is fading. Perhaps most notably oil prices have gone vertical. They reached $120 a barrel overnight and were at about $100 a barrel at the time we recorded the podcast.

That compares with $55 a barrel in December and $65 a barrel just before the war. The average price of gas nationally has shot up 50 cents per gallon in just a week and now sits at about $3.50 per gallon.

Last week Congress declined to rein in Trump’s authority in the conflict, but that doesn’t mean the domestic politics of the matter are settled. Not by a long shot. With me to discuss the unfolding politics here at home is Gabe Fleisher, author of the “Wake Up To Politics” newsletter.

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.

The war in Iran has set off a civil war within the Republican Party over whether the military adventurism of Trump’s second term is America first or America last. As one indication, Megyn Kelly kicked off her podcast on Monday (one of the most popular right-wing shows in the country) with withering criticism of Trump’s decision. Her first guest, Marjorie Taylor Greene, suggested it could lead her to stop voting.

On Tuesday, Texas’s incumbent senator, John Cornyn, managed to fight his primary merely to a draw with scandal-plagued Ken Paxton after spending a record $70 million. Further down the ballot, once rising star Rep. Dan Crenshaw lost his primary outright. The tensions within the GOP, at least at the elite level, are already at a rolling boil. So what happens when Trump — a force helping to hold both parties’ coalitions together — leaves the scene?

That is the question I attempted to answer, alongside friends of the podcast Nate Silver and Clare Malone, at a live show Wednesday night at the Comedy Cellar in New York City. Joined by a rowdy, sold-out crowd, we hosted our first-ever 2028 Republican primary draft. We even got a West Village audience to applaud for Tucker Carlson. (If you missed our Democratic primary draft from January, I encourage you to check it out!)

We also discussed the political consequences of the big news stories of the day: the results in Texas on both sides of the aisle, the expanding war in the Middle East, and a torrent of attention-grabbing AI news. Plus, we opened the mics and answered audience questions.

Looking for nerdy yet irreverent coverage of the Texas primaries Tuesday night?! We’ll be live streaming with friends of the pod beginning at 7:30pm ET on March 3rd. Join us at the link here.

We were originally planning on dedicating today’s whole episode to the kickoff of the 2026 primary calendar with Tuesday’s elections in Texas, North Carolina and Arkansas. However, if I’ve learned anything hosting the GD POLITICS podcast, it’s to be flexible — we might end up at war.

The U.S. and Israel struck Iran beginning on Saturday, killing Iran’s supreme leader. Iran responded, attacking Israel, U.S. military assets, and civilian targets in the Gulf States. Hezbollah in Lebanon has also joined the fighting.

As of the time of our recording, the back-and-forth bombing is continuing and there are more questions than answers about what will happen next. Will there be a revolution in Iran? Will it be successful? What would the current regime staying in power look like? How wide could the conflict spread and how long could it last?

I’m sure those are questions we’ll contend with in the future. Today we are going to kick things off with how the American public views the conflict and how politicians are reacting.

Then we will move on to Tuesday’s primaries. The blockbuster races are the Republican and Democratic Senate primaries in Texas. I’ve covered a lot of these races in my day and I can’t remember the last time I saw polling as contradictory as what we’re seeing in the race between Jasmine Crockett and James Talarico in Texas. We’ll also touch on some of the House primaries worth keeping an eye on Tuesday night.

Joining me is director of data at FiftyPlusOne, Mary Radcliffe, and deputy editor of Inside Elections, Jacob Rubashkin.

President Trump offered strikingly few proposals in the longest State of the Union address ever delivered and what he did offer was not particularly heavy on legislation or ambition. Instead, he leaned into conflict with the Democrats in the chamber and highlighted stories from guests in the audience that often included graphic details. Friends of the podcast Mary Radcliffe and Nathaniel Rakich joined this throwback late-night reaction episode to discuss this and much more.

Today’s episode turned out to be serendipitous. Last Friday, I’d been planning to speak with Harvard economist Jason Furman, Obama’s top economic advisor, about the recent flood of economic data: the jobs report and revisions for the past year, inflation data, GDP growth, trade balances, consumer sentiment, and more.

There was one piece of data I did not expect we’d be getting in advance of our conversation: the Supreme Court’s decision on President Trump’s emergency tariffs. Friday morning, the Court struck them down in a 6-3 decision, concluding that the power to enact such broad tariffs lies with Congress.

So, on today’s episode, we begin with the latest tariff news and then widen the lens to the broader economy, including Furman’s suggestion that we may have achieved the first indisputable “soft landing” in postwar American history: bringing inflation under control without triggering a recession.

Subscribe to GD POLITICS wherever you listen to podcasts. The video version of this interview is available here.

My favorite interviews with politicians happen when they’ve run their last race and can reflect candidly on their time in office and the complexities of politics and the world. Today you’re going to hear such an interview with former governor of Texas and former secretary of energy Rick Perry.

We begin by talking about the heated Senate primary in Texas. The former governor has thrown his support behind incumbent Sen. John Cornyn and doesn’t shy away from criticisms of Attorney General Ken Paxton or the Democratic side.

We then turn to a more personal topic: Perry’s experience with the psychoactive drug ibogaine and his advocacy for its use in treating things like addiction, PTSD, brain trauma, and cognitive decline. It may seem like a counterintuitive position for a social conservative, and we get into that.

We end by talking about the moment during the 2012 GOP primary debate when Perry forgot the name of one of the agencies he intended to shutter as president — the Department of Energy. It became something of a viral moment at the time, but in this interview we talk about what was going on in his personal life, which he describes as the most difficult six months of his life.