Virginia's Special Election Insights

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I recorded today’s podcast on Wednesday before the news broke that Charlie Kirk was killed, so I want to take a moment to address it at the start.

It’s despicable and saddening. It’s sad on a human level and sad on a national level. On a human level, my heart goes out to Charlie’s family and his young children. On a national level, it’s a horrific situation to be in that someone was murdered while engaging in debate on a college campus. People must feel safe to speak their minds in a free country — left, right, center, controversial or not.

At the time I’m writing this, we don’t have details about the perpetrator, but all indications point toward political violence. If you’re a longtime listener, you’ve been alongside me for far too much political violence: multiple assassination attempts against President Trump, January 6th, the shooting of Steve Scalise, the shooting of two state lawmakers in Minnesota, the El Paso Walmart shooting, the Brian Thompson shooting, this assassination of Charlie Kirk, and more.

Partisans may focus on blaming a political party. We know from evidence that’s not helpful. The best way to prevent future political violence is for all leaders to condemn it in the clearest, strongest terms whenever it happens, by whoever it’s committed. Evidence also suggests that it’s a very small number of Americans who see violence as an acceptable form of political behavior. Tragically, though, all it takes is one person to wreak havoc on our nation and our system.

It’s heartening to see the most prominent Democratic leaders condemning the violence in absolute terms. It’s disheartening to see left-wing provocateurs celebrating and right-wing provocateurs describing this as a call to arms.

For my part, this is the whole ballgame. Decreasing political discord and engendering a shared sense of fate amongst Americans is one of the things I care most about. I hope I never have to cite statistics or evidence about the number of Americans who support political violence again on the GD POLITICS podcast. I sadly know that’s unlikely.

It’s hard to feel optimistic at a moment like this, but I do feel thankful for the positive community we have here on this podcast. So thank you for that and my prayers are with Charlie Kirk’s family.

The bulk of today’s show focuses on recent elections and questions from listeners. We got a lot of great questions, so please continue sending them in.

We talk about why Trump’s approval rating has been holding up better now than in his first term, whether all those spam calls and texts are making it harder to poll, and how young voters’ priorities are diverging along gender and partisan lines. We’ve also got some recent election news, including the special election in Virginia and a national election in Norway.

With me to discuss all of that and more is friend of the pod and senior data scientist at the Washington Post Lenny Bronner.