Weekend Reading : Weekend Reading Live

The Real Third Rail in American Politics

Michael Podhorzer — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 13:11:35 GMT

Robert P. Jones founded the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) because he knows that you can’t understand American politics without understanding religion. The influence of Christian nationalism, especially among white Evangelicals in the South, explains why Trump’s base has stayed with him through so much scandal — and why our politics in general is so polarized and dysfunctional. (For more on that point, read my 2023 post, “How White Christian Political Might Made the Republican Party Hard Right, in 8 Charts.”) We hear nonstop about the so-called diploma divide, but almost nothing about the much larger and more consequential religious divides.

So why do we almost never hear about religion in political reporting? As Robby and I discussed, it’s a third rail for reasons that are understandable, but not defensible. Nobody wants to risk offending or essentializing people’s most deeply held beliefs — but those beliefs, and the institutions behind them, are too important to ignore.

Other highlights of our conversation included:

Why Trump can’t take Catholic voters for granted. He’s never had a lock on Catholics the same way he has on Evangelicals — and that was before his war on Iran and his public attacks on Pope Leo XIV. (Also, Vance is the one who should be more “careful” about theology; the Pope has been so outspoken about the war in Iran because Catholic doctrine is very clear about the immorality of wars of choice.)
- More at Robby’s Substack: “How Trump’s Fight with Pope Leo XIV May Hurt Republicans in the Midterms.”
How Pete Hegseth’s anti-DEI crusade is really about mainstreaming white Christian nationalism in the military.
Why reporters who refuse to use the term “Christian nationalism” are out of step with well-grounded social science research.
The enormous influence of Christian media on those within its bubble (which doesn’t include most political reporters).
How the Roberts Court has weaponized (individual) religious liberty to curtail other freedoms.

Make sure to pre-order Robby’s new book, Backslide: Reclaiming a Faith and a Nation After the Christian Turn Against Democracy, here.

In addition to the book and his research at PRRI, be sure to follow his popular weekly Substack newsletter, Redeeming Democracy.

The Roberts Court Memos: Fool Me 150 Times, Shame on Me

Michael Podhorzer — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 15:06:04 GMT

Over the weekend, The New York Times published a series of February 2016 internal memos about the shadow docket that revealed John Roberts operating as the partisan actor he’s always been — despite his reputation as a serious institutionalist that outlets like the Times have long helped him cultivate. It’s a perfect example of why I consider the Times both indispensable and indefensible: it conducts critical investigations that many of its own reporters and editors seem not to read or think about in their own coverage.

Lisa Graves, author of Without Precedent: How Chief Justice Roberts and His Accomplices Rewrote the Constitution and Dismantled Our Rights, is one of the nation’s foremost experts on the billionaire-funded right-wing capture of the Supreme Court, and one of the best people I could think of to talk about these revelations with.

We discussed why people should be enraged about not just the Roberts Court, but also its billionaire backers — and the media that erases the influence of those backers while giving institutional cover to an illegitimate, captured body.

We covered, among other things:

Why Roberts has always been the one undermining the legitimacy of his Court, not the people calling him out for it.
How the leaked memos reveal his improper, politicized pre-judgement of the case about Obama’s Clean Power Plan.
The extraordinary influence of dark money, especially from the fossil fuel industry (e.g. Charles Koch) on capturing the Supreme Court, and why we so rarely hear about it in mainstream court coverage.
Why the “liberal” justices are often the real conservatives on the Court (e.g. trying to defend precedents that were themselves compromises handed down by Republican justices);
How the capture goes beyond SCOTUS; for instance, the Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo, who selected Trump’s Supreme Court nominees, also worked to place sympathetic attorneys general like West Virginia’s who could bring strategic cases like one against the Clean Power Plan.
Why the “rule of law” tends to mean “rule by lawyers,” even and especially among liberal institutionalists, and how to focus instead on the rule of justice.

Available for iOS and Android

Orbán's Defeat and Lessons for America

Michael Podhorzer — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 23:43:57 GMT

Kim Lane Scheppele, the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and International Affairs at Princeton University, is one of the foremost experts on Hungary and the collapse of constitutional democracies. On “Weekend Reading Live” today, she gave us the complete rundown on the rise and fall of Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s authoritarian prime minister who was decisively defeated yesterday, and what this defeat means both for Hungary and the world.

After Orbán won power in 2010, he quickly worked to consolidate it permanently (he thought) in the previously-robust democracy. In addition to rewriting the constitution to give himself advantage, he used tactics that should sound very familiar to us: weaponizing the state budget to defund media, NGOs, and universities that could oppose him; suspending civil service protections and mass-firing government employees; packing the courts with loyalists; and using extreme gerrymandering. (For Trump, the latter two things were already done before he took office.)

There’s a reason Orbán’s playbook sounds so familiar — Project 2025 was co-developed with Orbán’s Danube Institute think tank, which also trained figures like Christopher Rufo.

Kim explained how Orbán’s opponent, Peter Magyar, was able to use Orbán’s system against him to win a massive victory. It’s a fascinating story, complete with a zebra serving as a powerful symbol against corruption and oligarchy. There are key lessons for the U.S. about how to defeat an entrenched autocracy.

But even though Magyar has the supermajority he needs to amend the constitution, he still faces challenges that might require him to use some of Orbán’s own playbook to fully dismantle the old system. And while global far-right networks share tactics across borders, pro-democracy forces are still too often siloed within their own nations.

We covered a lot more in our conversation — the role of oligarchy, social media, and moral panic in both the U.S. and Hungary; how both the Roberts Court and Hungarian courts will occasionally rule against the executive on lower-stakes issues to maintain the illusion of independence; and more. You should also check out Kim’s article detailing how Orbán managed to steal so many elections.

Available for iOS and Android

The Voters Who Will Decide the Midterms

Michael Podhorzer — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 13:47:27 GMT

G. Elliott Morris, of the essential Strength in Numbers, joined me for a deep dive (with plenty of charts) into Democrats’ prospects for the midterms, Trump’s approval, and more.

We covered:

Why the voters who decide elections tend to be the ones who don’t love either party — and why those voters keep favoring Democrats in the Trump era.
Answers to the question in Elliott’s post, “Trump is 20+ points underwater. So why aren’t Democrats up 20 for the midterms?” One reason is that voters who “somewhat disapprove” of Trump are not reliably pro-Democrat; they include many Trump voters and non-voters who are feeling left behind economically.
Many reasons that 2026 looks good for Democrats. For instance, midterms tend to energize supporters of the party that lost the last election, and people who stayed home in 2024 favor Democrats. But what’s happening now is also more than just a “thermostatic” effect; it’s a reaction to real and terrible things that the Trump regime is doing.
Elliott’s preliminary voter file analysis from the Arizona CD-7 special election and New Jersey governor’s race, which found that partisan turnout differential (more Democrats than Republicans showing up to vote) accounted for the majority of Democrats’ gains.
The frustrating lack of nuance and one-dimensionality from those who counsel Democrats to “moderate” on policy. (Everything looks like a nail if you’re a hammer salesman.)

Greg Sargent: Playing Offense on Immigration

Michael Podhorzer — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 17:55:47 GMT

Greg Sargent, staff writer at The New Republic and former longtime Washington Post columnist, joined me to examine why elites keep misreading public opinion about Trump and giving Democrats bad advice as a result.

Even now, as Trump’s approval generally and on “immigration” specifically is in the toilet, there’s a desire to believe that he has tapped into some genuine Völkisch sentiment of the public. But Americans’ views on immigration aren’t hard to understand — and they haven’t changed much if at all since before the election. Most Americans think there should be a path to citizenship for people who have lived here for years. They also think laws matter and should be enforced. They also don’t want to see their neighbors violently rounded up and sent to prison camps — and were not sufficiently warned about Trump’s plans to do just that. (For more on this from me, see “Poll-Washing Our Way to Fascism” and “The Re-Emerging Anti-MAGA Majority.”)

We talked about why The New York Times is both indispensable (this 2023 piece outlined nearly all of the grisly details about Trump’s deportation scheme) and indefensible (by refusing to let that reporting inform their politics coverage, as I wrote in "Does Joe Kahn Trust the New York Times?").

We talked about, as Greg argued recently, “How the Democrats Can Play Offense on Immigration” — by loudly drawing attention to Trump’s crimes against humanity instead of staying silent like so many counsel.

As Greg noted, behind many of the squabbles we hear about wokeness, there is a shadow debate about how politics work — how voters process information and how to persuade them in the Trump era. And too often, the people who claim to be neutral data scientists are being intellectually lazy and affirming their own priors about that question.

The Status Threat Behind MAGA

Michael Podhorzer — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 23:28:23 GMT

My guest today on Weekend Reading Live was Chris Parker, a renowned professor of political science at UC Santa Barbara and the principal of Black Insights Research, a consulting firm specializing in the study of the Black community.

Chris’s award-winning books have rewritten public understanding about reactionary movements (Change They Can’t Believe In: The Tea Party and Reactionary Politics in America, co-authored with Matt A. Barreto) and the role of Black veterans in the civil rights movement (Fighting for Democracy: Black Veterans and the Struggle Against White Supremacy in the Postwar South).

We had a rich discussion about his areas of expertise, including:

How status threat — white Christian men’s belief that they are losing social, cultural, or political status — has driven reactionary movements from the KKK to the Tea Party to MAGA, and how it is shaped by geography and social environment. (For instance, Blue states like California and Massachusetts have undergone dramatic demographic change without the political backlash seen in red states.)
Why Black military service in World War II and Korea was an underappreciated driver of the civil rights movement, with veterans’ courage and conviction that they deserved full citizenship spreading in their communities.
Key findings from longitudinal research conducted by Chris’s firm on the Black community during the 2024 election cycle — including the fact that 70% of low-propensity Black voters were never reached by the Harris campaign.
Why obsessing over “the white working class” leads Democrats astray and alienates Black voters.

Available for iOS and Android

Jason Stanley on Fascism

Michael Podhorzer — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 22:07:16 GMT

My guest today was Jason Stanley, an expert on fascism and the philosophy of language who left his position at Yale to move his family to Toronto. Jason has long known that MAGA was a fascist movement, and we worked together in 2020 to try to warn people about that threat.

Calling Trump and MAGA “fascist” out loud was once a surefire way to be mocked and dismissed from left, right, or center. But as we discussed here, fascism isn’t an insult — it’s an analytical framework that both explains why Trump and MAGA are doing what they do, and lets us anticipate what they will do. Anyone who understood this from the beginning hasn’t been surprised by much of what Trump has done, including his imperialist warmongering and brutal mass deportations.

Jason had sharp insights to share on topics including:

Language as a political weapon that the right wing has always understood how to wield;
Why erasing Black history is a deliberate strategy to prevent people from recognizing historical patterns being repeated today (see his recent Guardian piece on this subject);
How his own family history (two Jewish parents who escaped the Holocaust as children) informs his scholarship and his willingness to speak out;
The need to explicitly name, not shy away from, the white supremacy and patriarchy that are now official government policy.

For those of you in Brooklyn, on Thursday you can see Jason in conversation with Nikole Hannah-Jones, Pulitzer Prize-winning creator of The 1619 Project.

Jason Stanley is the author of seven books, including How Fascism Works and Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future. He is the Bissell-Heyd chair in American studies at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy at the University of Toronto.

More Reading:

Sleepwalking Our Way to Fascism (Weekend Reading)

Democracy is Not a Spectator Sport (Weekend Reading)

Politics and the English Language (George Orwell)

Available for iOS and Android

Mapping Christian Nationalism

Michael Podhorzer — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 20:01:06 GMT

PRRI (Public Religion Research Institute) is one of the most important research organizations out there because of its consistent, rigorous survey data on the essential role that religion plays in our politics. I talked with their CEO, Melissa Deckman, about PRRI’s new report, “Mapping Christian Nationalism Across the 50 States: Insights from PRRI’s 2025 American Values Atlas.” It shows the strong links between Christian nationalism, which only about 3 in 10 Americans support, and Republican politics (56% of Republicans support it), authoritarianism, and political violence. It features a “heat map” that tracks the prevalence of Christian nationalism at the state level; the more Christian nationalist a state is, the more Republicans will serve in its legislature.

There are many more insights worth digging into in the report and in our conversation. PRRI’s work helps show why the typical demographic analyses of politics (college/non-college, etc.) fall woefully short of explaining what’s really going on.

Available for iOS and Android

Coffee with Contrarians

Michael Podhorzer — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 15:40:00 GMT

Available for iOS and Android

Lisa Graves on Judicial Capture and Minnesota

Michael Podhorzer — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 16:24:13 GMT

I was joined on Weekend Reading Live yesterday by Lisa Graves, author of Without Precedent: How Chief Justice Roberts and His Accomplices Rewrote the Constitution and Dismantled Our Rights (a must-read, as is her Substack, Grave Injustice). We delved into why the Roberts Court is historically unique in the way it’s been captured by dark-money interests—a history Lisa knows firsthand, based on her experience as chief counsel on the Senate Judiciary Committee and her work on the judicial nominations process for the Justice Department.

And it’s not just the Supreme Court; the Eighth Circuit, which has jurisdiction over Minnesota, has also been captured and has repeatedly intervened to block lower-court efforts to restrain ICE abuses and protect basic constitutional rights.

As we discussed, the phrase “not above the law” has no meaning anymore when the Roberts Court keeps changing what the law means. Lisa will be joining me more regularly from now on to keep track of the latest.

Available for iOS and Android

G. Elliott Morris on Texas, Immigration Polling, and "Median Voter" Folly

Michael Podhorzer — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 20:45:24 GMT

The great G. Elliott Morris (subscribe to his Substack, Strength in Numbers, for better data-driven polling journalism than you’ll find almost anywhere) joined me on Weekend Reading Live today for an insightful discussion about polling and strategy, including:

Taylor Rehmet’s massive upset win in Texas, where the district swung about 30 points towards Democrats — and where Rehmet, a union machinist with deep community roots, defied typical narratives about Democrats needing “moderate” candidates to win in red places;
Elliott’s prescient polling and analysis starting last year that showed the unpopularity of Trump’s brutal deportation (as opposed to “immigration”) policies, and the problems with most mainstream polling on the topic;
Why the “median voter” theory (the idea that elections are won by moving toward a mythical ideological center) is garbage;
How a certain crowd of “Capital-S Strategists” keeps using “data” to confirm what big funders already want Democrats to do;
And much more.

Links:

The ICE Shootings Are a Tipping Point (Strength in Numbers)

Blue wave watch: Democrat flips Trump +17 Texas Senate seat in 32-point swing (Strength in Numbers)

Poll-Washing Our Way to Fascism (Weekend Reading)

Available for iOS and Android

Democrats Are Winning – But Are They Learning?

Michael Podhorzer — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 17:38:29 GMT

I joined J Street’s “Word on the Street Live” to discuss last week’s elections and what’s next.

I talked about how important it is to understand that our elections are decided not by hard partisans, but by a group of people who are increasingly dissatisfied with the way the political system and economy has been delivering for them in their lives. In 9 of the last 10 midterm or presidential elections, the party that wins the last election loses the next one (at least one chamber of Congress or the White House). Young voters and Latino voters swung the most in 2024, and swung the most in the other direction this time, because neither was actually endorsing MAGA or Trump’s policies. And importantly, a different set of young and Latino voters decide to show up vs. stay home each time.

When asked about what 2028 might look like, I cautioned against viewing it in “normal politics” terms; we don’t know what kinds of authoritarian voter purges or opposition crackdowns are coming, for instance. But the most successful leaders of the Democratic Party are probably going to be people we don’t know about now. The way to change the Democratic Party is to have more Democrats who are different and aggressive in fighting for what people want. There’s not an example in American history of big change coming from existing party leadership; change happens when massive victories change who the party is. That was true when FDR came to power and when MAGA took over the Republicans.

Available for iOS and Android

Live with Harry Litman: Where is the electorate now?

Michael Podhorzer — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 17:38:13 GMT

I joined Harry Litman this week to talk about why the “multiracial working-class realignment” was always an invention of the pundit class, which still refuses to acknowledge its error; the possibility that Republican redistricting could be “dummymandering” in a big Blue Wave year; and the dangers of various upcoming Republican election-subversion efforts, which all boil down to undermining confidence in results and creating pretexts to send disputes to the either the Roberts Court or Mike Johnson in the House.

Available for iOS and Android

Election Deep Dive with Perry Bacon

Michael Podhorzer — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 22:14:36 GMT

I joined Perry Bacon on The New Republic’s Substack Live today to unpack last week’s election results. My main takeaway: This should be an accountability election for the commentariat that keeps telling us the wrong thing about what’s going on in America. For instance:

There was no grand “realignment” where key demographic groups, like young Black and Latino men, “moved right.” We should think of people who decide American elections not as demographic categories, and not as “progressive” or “moderate,” but as a group of people who are pissed off at the party in power or dissatisfied with how politics is working for their lives.
Discourse has been captured by a group of analysts and strategists who have lost sight of how you actually win elections and make big gains—as if the only thing that matters in football is extra points and field goals, not touchdowns. (It’s silly to argue about which style field goal kicker you should draft when your team is down by 10 in the fourth quarter.)
Democrats should be much more ambitious about how many races are put in play when it could be a wave year. In 2006, Rahm Emanuel arguably cost Democrats seats by discouraging investment in a number of winnable races—including one candidate in Minnesota by the name of Tim Walz.
“Turnout” and “persuasion” have become ideologically coded as “progressive” and “moderate,” respectively—but that’s not how people decide who to vote for, or whether to vote at all. It makes perfect sense that for the same reasons, some in the “pissed off” block who stayed home last year would realize they needed to show up this year, and some who gave Trump a chance last year would switch to vote for the Democrat, or stay home, this year.

Available for iOS and Android

Interview with Julian Zelizer on the elections, SCOTUS, and more

Michael Podhorzer — Wed, 05 Nov 2025 23:16:00 GMT

Available for iOS and Android

Robert P. Jones on White Christianity and Asymmetric Polarization

Michael Podhorzer — Mon, 27 Oct 2025 23:32:46 GMT

Few people have done more to illuminate how religion—and particularly white Christianity—shapes American politics than Robert P. Jones, the president and founder of the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI—subscribe to their Substack here). In our Substack Live chat, Robert and I discussed new findings from PRRI’s 2025 American Values Survey, conducted with Brookings—which shows that Americans are much less divided, and much more opposed to the Trump regime, than we’re led to believe.

Most Americans believe the administration has gone too far on things like ICE detentions, closing government agencies, and cutting funding to research and universities. Strong majorities share basic values about pluralism and inclusion, including the idea that we should give unauthorized immigrants living here a path to citizenship, not round them up and deport them. And when given a choice between calling Trump a “dangerous dictator” or a “strong leader,” even larger majorities choose “dictator” now (including a nine-point jump among independents, two-thirds of whom now choose this option) than the first time the survey asked this question at Trump’s 100-day mark.

The survey helps show that our polarization is asymmetric—it’s not two parties drifting apart equally, but Trump and the Republican Party moving away from most Americans. It also shows what we miss when the media ignores the ethno-religious nature of our political divides. The Republican Party is nearly 70% white and Christian (compared to 41% of the US). Trump’s biggest supporters are white Evangelical Protestants—who make up only 13% of the population but whose power is magnified by numerous structural and organizing advantages. (For more on that, read my 2023 post on “How White Christian Political Might Made the Republican Party Hard Right.”) And among Latinos, being Protestant is the most powerful predictor of Trump support—but while about six in ten of them voted for Trump in 2024, 53% now choose the “dangerous dictator” option.

For more from Robert P. Jones, read his books (The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy and the Path to a Shared American Future, a New York Times bestseller; White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity, which won a 2021 American Book Award; and The End of White Christian America, which won the 2019 Grawemeyer Award in Religion.) He also writes weekly at www.whitetoolong.net, a newsletter focused on religion, racial justice, and democracy.

Available for iOS and Android

Michael Klarman on the Framers' Coup

Michael Podhorzer — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 22:02:28 GMT

I had the privilege of speaking with Michael Klarman, the Charles Warren Professor of Legal History at Harvard Law School, about how the Constitution was really made and what that means for us today. As Michael covered in his essential book, The Framers’ Coup: The Making of the United States Constitution, the Constitution’s ratification was far less democratic and more controversial than most of us imagine. Madison, Hamilton, Washington, and other elite framers wanted a government less responsive to popular opinion, seeking to curb the redistributive, democratic tendencies that emerged in state constitutions after the Revolutionary War.

We discussed how these founding divisions between elite control and popular power echo through today’s democratic crises—especially when it comes to the capture of the Supreme Court and the Republican Party by right-wing plutocrats and white Christian nationalists. We talked about the difference between popular constitutionalism and judicial supremacy; the incoherence and ahistorical nature of “originalism”; why plutocrats and Republicans who neither liked Trump nor necessarily opposed democracy are now consolidating behind his authoritarian rule; and much more.

Some links to more of Michael Klarman’s commentary and scholarship:

A debate with Jonathan Turley at Colgate University on whether we are in a constitutional crisis
“Last Lecture” on Threat to Democracy and Rule of Law posed by Trump Administration (April 2025)
Harvard Law Review (2020): The Degradation of American Democracy — And the Court
Books:

Available for iOS and Android

Interview with Julian Zelizer

Michael Podhorzer — Wed, 22 Oct 2025 22:19:00 GMT

Available for iOS and Android

John Roberts and the Supreme Court of Red America

Michael Podhorzer — Thu, 02 Oct 2025 17:02:28 GMT

Lisa Graves has seen the billionaire-backed capture of the Supreme Court coming from the beginning, from her work at the Department of Justice and the Senate Judiciary Committee and her 16 years investigating the right-wing infrastructure that has been taking over our government. Her essential new book, Without Precedent: How Chief Justice Roberts and His Accomplices Rewrote the Constitution and Dismantled Our Rights, is full of new information and paints the clearest picture I’ve seen of just how nakedly political John Roberts and the other Federalist Society-backed justices have always been.

Roberts was sworn in 20 years ago this week, and Lisa and I discussed how he’s been putting one over on the American people ever since—painting himself as a sober institutionalist while he has always been a right-wing ringer. Roberts began his career Reagan-era operative deeply involved in blocking civil rights advances, especially efforts to strengthen the Voting Rights Act. He has bided his time to achieve those goals on the Court—chipping away at our rights and rewriting the plain meaning of the Constitution, just gradually enough to keep the frogs from noticing the boiling water until it was too late. He claimed to be just an umpire calling balls and strikes, but the game is actually Calvinball. (Fun fact: he never played baseball, but he was a linebacker who was known for studying the opposition and strategizing how to defeat it.)

Legal journalism often normalizes or soft-pedals the Court’s choices, ignoring its role in handpicking cases, its deep ties to right-wing funders, and Roberts’ blocking of ethics reforms while pretending to uphold standards. What distinguishes this Court from other bad Courts and decisions (and there have been many) is that no other Supreme Court has been deliberately packed with hand-picked loyalists to a particular billionaire-backed agenda. And if Roberts cares about how history views him and his Court, it’s with the gamble that history will be written by the MAGA victors.

Randi Weingarten on Why Fascists Fear Teachers

Michael Podhorzer — Mon, 29 Sep 2025 23:45:59 GMT

I spoke today with Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), about her excellent new book, Why Fascists Fear Teachers, and about how both teachers and unions play an essential role in promoting democracy and fighting fascism.

In the classroom, teachers develop the habits of democracy through critical thinking and problem solving, and the habits of humanity by creating a pluralistic, safe, and welcoming environment in classrooms. In unions, working people learn and practice the habits of democracy, including working towards common goals with people very different from themselves.

All of this is a powerful antidote to fascist tactics of fear and division—which is why it’s no accident that authoritarians like Trump attack both public education and the labor movement, and why both are so essential to defend.