Crashing The Political Party

This week, AJ is joined by Dr. Luke Oldfield, a political scientist at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand to talk about NZ's upcoming national election. While some of the core constituent concerns will sound familiar to Americans - affordability, health care - the political system is quite different! We learn about NZ's multi-party landscape, their voting system, governing coalitions, and more!

We're joined this week by Marcia Kelbon, an Independent running in Washington's 24th legislative district for Position 2 in the Washington House of Representatives. She shares the nature of her district, her governing priorities, her thoughts on compassion in leadership, and more!

This week AJ speaks with Jeff Kelly, Cascade Party candidate for WA State District 38 candidate!

This week, we've got an Office Hours episode! Producer Kelly Attaway joins to ask AJ questions from listeners, and he explains how alternative candidates influence elections, how voter forecasting is like observing a mosh pit, the importance of healthy skepticism for generative AI in politics, how ranked choice voting works with easy examples, and more!

For this episode, we're joined by Greg Ballard, the Lincoln Party's nominee for Indiana's Secretary of State. AJ and Greg talk about his background, why he's running what a Secretary of State does, his policy priorities, what it took to get on the ballot, book recommendations, questions from listeners, and more!