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Democratic Rep. Jasmine Crockett has jumped into the Texas Senate primary with just three months to go until Election Day. She’s controversial, at times outright offensive, and gets the cable news part of her party very excited. She also appears to be leading in early primary polling. (Sound familiar?) So, is the candidate The Atlantic is calling “a Democrat for the Trump era” up to the task of flipping Texas? Frankly, is any Democrat up to the task?

On today’s podcast we take a look at how 2026 primaries are shaping up around the country in both the House and Senate. Beyond Texas, we check in on the latest in Maine, Michigan, and Georgia and debate whether the dividing lines are mainly generational, ideological, or just a fighter mentality. We also look at the results of recent elections in Miami and Tennessee where Democrats over-performed.

Lastly, a case at the Supreme Court this week considers how much money the political parties should be able to spend in coordination with candidates. Should the relatively low caps be kept in place or should the flood gates be opened? With me to talk about it all is Deputy Editor of Inside Elections Jacob Rubashkin.

If you are tired of hearing about how messy American politics are, today I’m offering you a reprieve. You’re going to hear about how messy British politics are.

Last week I was in London, exploring the city and speaking with journalists, friends and strangers alike about life in Britain. I visited a couple newsrooms and toured parliament during Prime Minister’s Questions. The big news of the day was the Labour government’s budget proposal and, despite their largest majority in nearly 30 years, Labour seems to be facing challenges on all sides.

If American politics can feel disappointing or frustrating, wait till you hear Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s approval rating: net -52 percentage points. By comparison President Trump, facing his own second term low of net -14 points, looks utterly popular.

Today we get into the challenges facing the Labour party and much more – the rise of the populist Right in the UK and Europe, relations with the US, and yes, people are still talking about Brexit.

To do this I reassembled the team from the dearly departed Talking Politics podcast. The former hosts, Helen Thompson and David Runciman, used to join me on the also departed FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast during the height of the Brexit drama. Think of this as the ghosts of two podcasts past.

Helen Thompson is a professor of political economy at Cambridge and author of the book “Disorder: Hard times in the 21st Century.” David Runciman is an honorary professor of politics at Cambridge and the host of the “Past Present Future” podcast.

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.

Oftentimes when we talk about what divides the United States we talk about things like education, race, gender, or class. My guest today makes the argument that there’s something else fundamental at play, stretching back hundreds of years, to well before the founding of the country: the regional cultures that were developed by the people who settled America.

It may seem like a stretch to say that after waves of immigration and internal migration, technological and social change, that the pilgrims, quakers, aristocrats, and pioneers are still culturally with us. But Colin Woodard argues that you can’t actually understand our contemporary politics and the fights we’re having without that context.

In his previous book “American Nations” he laid out what he described as the 11 different “nations” – or culturally distinct regions – within America. In his new book “Nations Apart” he looks at the political and social differences across them on everything from voting, to health outcomes, to gun violence.

He also discusses what kinds of common narratives have united us in the past and what might work again today based on public opinion research. Colin is the director of Nationhood Lab at the Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy at Salve Regina University.