Episodes

This week on Purple Political Breakdown: Trump's financial disclosure shows over 1.4 billion dollars in crypto related income tied to a company nobody can find on paper, the FBI has surged 260 analysts into re examining a Georgia election that's already been counted three times, and Russia hit Kyiv twice in five days right before a NATO summit. Radell connects the dots between all three, then digs into new Pew polling showing the world's confidence in America and Americans' confidence in their o...

Ohio sold fifteen thousand acres of public wildlife land to out of state frackers this week, days after officials killed a solar farm in Clark County. Meanwhile, over two thousand provisional ballots got thrown out in the May primary, and only 23 percent of Ohio's 18 year olds are registered to vote at all. The Supreme Court also handed down three rulings this week that land right back in Ohio, on mail ballots, birthright citizenship, and campaign finance. We close out with the two U.S. House ra...

This week is a different kind of Purple Political Breakdown: a solo, chat-driven deep dive on one question. Do you support packing the Supreme Court? Before you answer, Radell Lewis walks the entire board, because the honest version of this debate starts earlier than most coverage admits. You do not need new seats to pack a court if you control who fills the seats you already have. In 2016, Justice Scalia dies and Mitch McConnell blocks Merrick Garland for nearly a year on a "let the voters deci...

A war the country thought was over is back on, a housing bill almost everyone in Congress agreed on is frozen on the President's desk, and the Supreme Court just told the courts to stay out of its own immigration rulings. This week on Purple Political Breakdown, Radell Lewis connects one thread through all of it: a President who keeps choosing the fight over the people. In Nuanced News: the Iran ceasefire that already looks broken as fresh U.S. airstrikes hit this weekend, the Senate flip-flop o...

What does it take for a young, progressive Democrat to run for the Ohio Statehouse in a district that leans Republican? This week on the Purple Political Breakdown, Ohio Edition, I sit down with Daquan Neal, the Democratic nominee for Ohio House District 39, covering Northern Montgomery County and the Dayton area: Vandalia, Englewood, Huber Heights, Clayton, Northridge, Fort McKinley, Harrison Township, and Butler Township. Daquan is 30 years old, a Central State University graduate, and a forme...

The Iran ceasefire was supposed to be the win of the year. Three days after the signatures, the Strait of Hormuz is closed again, Lebanon is still burning, and the only people who seem sure it is holding are the ones who signed it. This week's Purple Political Breakdown pulls one thread through everything: the decisions that shape your life keep getting made in rooms you are not allowed to see. We get into the Iran memorandum and why a deal neither Israel nor Hezbollah signed is now supposed to ...

Purple Political Breakdown: Ohio Edition takes you through three Ohio congressional races and the statewide news shaping the 2026 midterms. Host Radell Lewis breaks down the 6th, 7th, and 8th districts: Michael Rulli versus Elizabeth Kirtley in the east, the more competitive Max Miller versus Brian Poindexter race in the northeast, and Warren Davidson versus Vanessa Enoch in the southwest, the district Radell calls home. Before the districts, Radell follows the money. New campaign finance report...

What does it take to run for the U.S. Senate in one of the reddest states in the country with no party machine behind you? On this episode I sit down with Todd Achilles, an independent candidate for U.S. Senate in Idaho who is challenging three-term incumbent Jim Risch. Todd went from Army tank commander to two decades in tech, with leadership roles at companies like Hewlett Packard and T-Mobile, then served in the Idaho House before leaving the parties entirely. He founded Veterans for Idaho Vo...

This week on Purple Political Breakdown: the guardrails keep getting overridden, and the polls say Americans can feel it. Radell breaks down a president who says an Iran peace deal gets signed any day now while telling you he loves the inflation that same war is causing. A new intelligence chief, Jay Clayton, nominated to clean up the Bill Pulte mess after FISA Section 702 surveillance authority quietly lapsed. Detainees on a hunger and labor strike at Delaney Hall in Newark, and the uncomfortab...

This week on Purple Political Breakdown Ohio Edition, Radell Lewis follows the money and the power across Ohio politics and keeps circling one question: who is Ohio's government actually working for? Radell opens with the biggest and newest story, the FBI search of the Cleveland offices of the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, a progressive group that registers voters, and why the timing and the target deserve a hard, skeptical look. He revisits the FirstEnergy corruption scandal as the real, prova...

The Michigan U.S. Senate Democratic primary just had its first real debate, and I broke down every answer in real time. On the stage at Mackinac: Mallory McMorrow, Haley Stevens, and Abdul El-Sayed, three Democrats fighting for the chance to take on Republican Mike Rogers in 2026. This is a new kind of episode for Purple Political Breakdown: live debate reaction, scored answer by answer, no team jersey, just who actually made the case. Here's what I dug into: Cost of living, debt, and the billio...

This week on Purple Political Breakdown, Radell Lewis starts with the Meet the Press clip where President Trump claims he never guaranteed no new wars, and uses it to set the night's thread: every guardrail we built only works if somebody enforces it. Nuanced News runs that thread through four stories. The Iran and Israel escalation, and a ceasefire that is not really a ceasefire while missiles fly and warships and drones share the same strait. Bill Pulte handed acting Director of National Intel...

Two Ohio congressional seats. Two settled outcomes. And two Republican candidates carrying controversies that are hard to ignore. On this episode of Purple Political Breakdown Ohio Edition, host Radell Lewis breaks down the 2026 races in Ohio's 2nd Congressional District, Republican incumbent David Taylor against Democrat Jen Mazzuckelli, and Ohio's 3rd Congressional District, longtime Democrat Joyce Beatty against Republican Cleophus Dulaney. Radell digs into the documented swastika flag contro...

Texas Republicans just traded a sitting U.S. senator for a man under multiple indictments by a 27-point margin. Ken Paxton, the Texas Attorney General with a securities fraud record, a bribery investigation, an impeachment by the Texas House, and a whistleblower settlement Texas taxpayers paid for, crushed two-decade incumbent John Cornyn in the May 26 Republican primary runoff. Cornyn's allies spent over $100 million documenting Paxton's scandals. The voters did not move. That fact is the real ...

Ohio Republicans redrew the 1st Congressional District to make it harder for a Democrat to hold, and now one of the most watched U.S. House races in the state is set: two-term incumbent Greg Landsman against Trump-endorsed newcomer Eric Conroy. In this solo episode of Purple Political Breakdown Ohio Edition, host Radell Lewis breaks down who these two men actually are and what their platforms would mean for the people of Ohio's 1st. On Landsman: the former public school teacher and Cincinnati co...

What does progressive even mean anymore? It is one of the most argued over words in American politics and one of the least defined. In this episode of Purple Political Breakdown, I sit down with progressive video essayist The Soy Pill to put the label under real pressure: where it holds up, where it falls apart, and why the left and the right keep talking past each other. We get into the questions people actually fight about. Is this just communism with better branding, or the Nordic style socia...

This week on Purple Political Breakdown, host Radell Lewis (Marine veteran, Ohio) connects the stories nobody else is connecting, with one thread running through all of them: when the people in power arrange the system around themselves, the rest of us get handed the bill. In Nuanced News, the Iran ceasefire is on life support, gas hit $4.52 a gallon (up more than 50 percent since the war began in February), and the President is floating a federal gas tax holiday that would shave off about 18 ce...

Every statewide executive office in Ohio is on the ballot in 2026, and not a single incumbent is defending a seat. Term limits cleared the building all at once. In this solo episode of Purple Political Breakdown Ohio Edition, Radell Lewis walks through the entire Ohio ballot, from the top of the ticket down to the competitive congressional districts, so you know exactly what you are voting on. Governor: Dr. Amy Acton vs. Vivek Ramaswamy. U.S. Senate: Sherrod Brown vs. Jon Husted. Plus Attorney G...

No news breakdown this week. Just a conversation. Radell took a few days off for a family milestone, and came back with a reset on why this show exists at all. This episode is the mission stated plainly: who Purple Political Breakdown is for, who it is not for, and why the goal was never to win an argument with people who have already decided. It is for the victims of the chaos and the people still reachable, not the loyalists. It is a case for defending American liberal democracy while demandin...

Ohio's 7th Congressional District is back on every Democratic flip list in the country, and on this episode of Purple Political Breakdown Ohio Edition, Radell Lewis sits down with two-time OH-7 Democratic congressional candidate Matt Diemer to break down why. Matt has run this district twice, in 2022 and 2024, and he knows exactly what it takes (and what it costs) to fight for a seat the national party has long written off. We dig into the new Democratic nominee Brian Poindexter, the messy reali...

The California governor 2026 race is the most crowded gubernatorial primary in state history, and most of the candidates getting the airtime are the ones writing the biggest checks. On this episode of Purple Political Breakdown, host Radell Lewis sits down with Reza Safarnejad, an independent (No Party Preference) candidate for governor of California whose ballot designation is Small Business Owner and whose path into politics started the day the Palisades fire burned his entire neighborhood to ...

The Supreme Court just gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act in Louisiana v. Callais , then broke its own 32-day procedural rule to enforce that ruling mid-election with over 100,000 Louisiana ballots already cast. Justice Jackson called the move "chaos" with "a strong political undercurrent." This episode connects the dots between Callais and the gerrymandering cascade now sweeping Indiana, Tennessee, Virginia, Alabama, and beyond, where MAGA Republicans are redrawing maps to win power they...

Ohio's 2026 primary delivered the tightest Democratic-to-Republican turnout split since 2006, plus a wave of results that reshape what to expect in November. In this solo episode of Purple Political Breakdown Ohio Edition, Radell Lewis breaks down the Democratic primary winners for governor, U.S. Senate, Secretary of State, Attorney General, and key congressional districts including OH-1, OH-3, OH-7, OH-9, OH-10, OH-12, OH-13, and OH-15. Then we dig into what the numbers actually mean: the Vance...

Host Radell Lewis takes you inside the May 5, 2026 Ohio primary election in this bonus episode of Purple Political Breakdown. Recorded in real time on primary day, this walkthrough covers everything from why Election Day should be a federal holiday to a live look at the Ohio sample ballot, the voter lookup process on the Ohio Secretary of State website, and the absentee ballot system most voters never use. Radell breaks down his ballot picks across the biggest 2026 Ohio primary races, including ...