200 episodes

The 538 team covers the latest in politics, tracking the issues and "game-changers" every week.

FiveThirtyEight Politics ABC News

    • News
    • 4.5 • 19.4K Ratings

The 538 team covers the latest in politics, tracking the issues and "game-changers" every week.

    It's Now Or Never For The GOP Candidates

    It's Now Or Never For The GOP Candidates

    The crew reacts to the second Republican presidential primary debate in this late night podcast.
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    • 39 min
    Why Our Politics Are Stuck In 2016

    Why Our Politics Are Stuck In 2016

    We are at an awkward moment in electoral politics. When it comes to the Republican primary, while there are plenty of alternatives to former President Donald Trump, none of them have gained serious traction. When it comes to Democrats, despite consternation about President Biden’s age and electability, he has no serious primary challengers.
    More than a year out from the presidential election, it seems like the writing is on the wall, that electoral politics are frozen in place, and few people are happy about it. In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, Galen Druke speaks with American politics professor Lynn Vavreck to help make sense of how we got here.
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    • 1 hr 10 min
    Workers Are Striking And Americans Are Into It

    Workers Are Striking And Americans Are Into It

    Welcome aboard the Acela, listeners. Today on the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, we are taking a break from the campaign trail and heading to Washington, D.C., where there’s quite a lot going on.
    House Speaker Kevin McCarthy announced last week that Republicans are opening an impeachment inquiry into President Biden. There are also just 12 days until a possible government shutdown. And some Republicans are threatening McCarthy's speakership.
    Politics reporter Leah Askarinam and POLITICO Playbook co-author and ABC News contributor Rachael Bade join Galen Druke to discuss. They also play a round of "Quiz of the Union," where they try to put this year's higher-than-usual number of strikes in the context of public opinion.
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    • 1 hr 10 min
    Why Biden Is Losing Support Among Voters Of Color

    Why Biden Is Losing Support Among Voters Of Color

    Among the most politically tuned-in, last week saw the kind of hand-wringing and accusations of bias surrounding the polls that you’d usually expect from the final two months of a campaign, not the final year and two months of a campaign.
    The focus was largely on general election polls: Whether a Wall Street Journal poll showing former President Donald Trump and President Biden tied is to be trusted. What to make of a CNN poll showing Nikki Haley as the only Republican candidate with a lead over Biden that falls outside the margin of error. How to understand data from the New York Times suggesting that Biden is losing support among voters of color.
    In this installment of the podcast, Galen speaks with Carlos Odio of Equis Research and Terrance Woodbury of HIT Strategies to parse through which recent data is actually worth paying attention to and which is sound and fury.
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    • 1 hr 15 min
    Is Donald Trump The Inevitable GOP Nominee?

    Is Donald Trump The Inevitable GOP Nominee?

    Now that we are on the other side of Labor Day and summer is subsiding, this is — as tradition goes — when focus on political campaigns really begins to heat up. The off-year elections this November will get some attention, but the main attraction is still the 2024 Republican presidential primary.
    In this installment of the podcast, we ask a question we will undoubtedly return to in the four months until the Iowa caucuses: Is Donald Trump’s nomination inevitable? And if not inevitable, how can we place the likelihood he wins the GOP primary in historical context?
    We also have partial results from two special primary elections and we debate “good or bad use of polling” for a classic and controversial topic: internal polls.
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    • 56 min
    Good Or Bad Use Of Polling: Extended Cut

    Good Or Bad Use Of Polling: Extended Cut

    This is a special end-of-meteorological-summer installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast. Galen Druke speaks with pollsters Kristen Soltis Anderson and David Byler in an episode made entirely of "good or bad use of polling" examples.
    They consider why GOP primary candidate Vivek Ramaswamy polls differently depending on survey methodology, what we can learn from post-debate polling, whether Nikki Haley used polling well in her debate performance and more.
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    • 1 hr 15 min

Customer Reviews

4.5 out of 5
19.4K Ratings

19.4K Ratings

Jason James Lemon ,

Podcast has become VERY glitchy

Hey I love the podcast, but in recent weeks every episode has become extremely glitchy (at least on Apple Podcast app). Multiple times in every episode the audio jumps ahead or jumps back. Sometimes it does this multiple times in a row or completely cuts off portions of the audio in mid sentence. Hoping this can get addressed and fixed moving forward!

Bluepum ,

Was a great podcast, now it’s a waste of time.

I’ve listened to this podcast since the beginning. So far they lost the immense talent of Micah Cohen, Nate Silver, Sarah E. Frostenson, Clare Malone, Perry Bacon Jr., and Alex Samuels.

Letting Nate Silver go was perhaps their largest mistake, with him gone, is it really FiveThirtyEight? Doesn’t sound like it.

It’s just a boring waste of time now. The “wonky” podcast I used to love sound like all the talking heads you see on 24/7 news channels. Just there to fill air.

Galen appears to try to hold it together, but the talent has been hollowed out to where I feel those on the podcast now would be better suited elsewhere. Nathaniel Rakich is still appreciated.

Basically, it’s trash now and I feel sorry for those stuck in contracts that can’t jump ship yet.

RECurley ,

Democrats Abroad

On the Union episode, 18 sept, I was struck by how little the group, Galen included, seemed to know about the issue. I am not referring to the game, where over/underestimating public opinion is common, but it seemed like nobody knew much about Union history, recent or otherwise. Galen quipped, toward the end, that perhaps people support unions more because unions are weak. Perhaps. But his example of a counterfactual was that people might be less supportive when teacher unions strike and their kids can’t go to school. Well, we know something about this, and in recent history huge numbers of Chicagoans supported their striking teachers, and that fact was important in the Union winning a robust contract. It is just an example, but I would like to see an expert panel that actually knows something about the issue. Robert Curley, Universidad de Guadalajara

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