CNN’s Dana Bash in Conversation with Leigh McGowan (PoliticsGirl): Elections that Changed the World

Please submit questions for the speakers in the chat starting on September 23 at approximately 7 pm ET.

If anyone can tell you what elections do to a country — not in theory, but in the arena of real life — it’s Dana Bash.

For three decades, Bash has had a front-row seat to the machinery of American power: the campaigns, the backroom deals, the implosions, the ambitions, the long memory of Washington — and its talent for misrepresentation. As CNN’s chief political correspondent, anchor of Inside Politics, and co-anchor of State of the Union, she has spent a career extracting signal from spin, pressing the powerful when the stakes are high, and making sense of the forces that shape how democracies hold — or come apart.

Now, in Elections that Changed the World: Fifteen Pivotal Moments That Shaped How We Live, Bash turns her eye to the elections that didn’t just decide winners, but altered the course of history — contests that redrew nations, toppled old orders, and transformed how power is won, yielded, and lost. She traces the through line from democracy’s earliest stress tests to the volatile electoral battles of our own age — and the political season barreling towards us now.

At a moment when democratic institutions are under strain, extremism is no longer fringe, and every election arrives freighted with existential consequence, Bash brings her unblinking understanding of how politics actually works. What do history’s most consequential elections reveal about the one ahead? What patterns are repeating? What dangers are newly familiar? And what, exactly, should we be watching for now?

A riveting evening with one of the most incisive observers in American journalism on power, political upheaval, and the elections that change everything.