Most of the political attention these days is centered in D.C, but there's a pretty fascinating primary contest happening just a train ride north in New York City. The Democratic primary for mayor of the Big Apple features a crowded field of Democrats, including some well known names like former Governor Andrew Cuomo, who was forced to resign after multiple sexual harassment allegations against him in 2021, and some new names like New York State Representative Zohran Mamdani, a Democratic Social...
Jun 20, 2025•36 min•Season 1Ep. 15
President Trump's signature legislation, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, is crawling its way through Congress. Having passed the House by a single vote, the so-called BBB is in the Senate where various Republican factions - the fiscal hawks, the centrists, the populists - are divided over how to resolve their many competing priorities over the national debt, Medicaid, and tax cuts to name a few. What's driving these ideological differences among Senate and House Republicans? What role has Trump ...
Jun 10, 2025•44 min•Season 3Ep. 14
When we booked this episode with Pod Save America co-host Dan Pfeiffer several weeks back, our plan was to talk about the Democrats and their strategy and messaging around Trump - something Dan's been writing about for his Substack, Message Box . Should Democrats just focus on the economy? Should they raise alarm bells over deportations? How loudly and strongly should they push back against Trump? And we do discuss that, but as it turned out, there was a lot more to talk about with Dan. For one,...
May 27, 2025•40 min•Season 3Ep. 13
Rahm Emanuel has held many titles: Congressman from Illinois, DCCC Chairman, Chief of Staff to Barack Obama, Mayor of Chicago, and Ambassador to Japan under President Biden. These days, he doesn't have an official position at the moment. But that's not stopping him from giving some very pointed advice to Democrats on every possible platform: cable TV, political shows, podcasts, late night TV, and different political conferences. So how does Rahm Emanuel think Democrats should be responding to Tr...
May 20, 2025•47 min•Season 3Ep. 12
You may know our guest today, Josh Holmes, as one of the hosts of the popular political podcast, Ruthless . For those of you who don't know, Ruthless is to the conservative media sphere as Pod Save America is to the liberal media ecosystem. But long before he started his podcasting gig, Amy knew Josh as a Republican political operative. He was chief of staff to Mitch McConnell and ran his 2014 re-election campaign. He also had a stint at the National Republican Senate Committee. He now runs the ...
May 13, 2025•48 min•Season 3Ep. 11
We are 100 days into the second Trump administration and there's no better person to help us understand what voters are making of these first months of Trump 2.0 than Republican pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson. Kristen is a founding partner of Echelon Insights, an opinion research and analytics firm. She's a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times and an on air political contributor at CNN. Quick disclaimer: we taped this conversation on Thursday, April 24th, before the flurry of 100...
Apr 29, 2025•47 min•Season 3Ep. 9
Way back in the late 1990s, Cook Political Report founder Charlie Cook had an idea to rank all 435 congressional districts by their partisanship - in other words, whether a district is more Republican or more Democratic. That way, we'd be able to see, at a quick glance, which members of Congress represented districts that were either slightly or strongly partisan. For example, is a certain Republican representative in a very solid Republican seat…. or in one that is only slightly red… or even on...
Apr 15, 2025•36 min•Season 3Ep. 9
On the last podcast, Amy talked with Chauncey McLean, head of the Democratic super PAC Future Forward, about their media strategy for Kamala Harris and why things didn't work out as they had hoped. For this podcast, we turn to the ad strategy of the Trump campaign with John Brabender, the chief creative officer for the media company BrabenderCox. John was hired as Trump's ad consultant in early 2023 and worked with him throughout the entire campaign. He had incredible access to and input from Do...
Apr 08, 2025•49 min•Season 3Ep. 8
Back in the 2012 cycle, Chauncey McLean was a young staffer on the Obama campaign working in the newly developing field of data analytics. Six years later, McLean put those data science skills - and the ones he developed while working in the private sector testing ads for commercial products - to work as head of the Democratic super PAC, Future Forward. Most outside super PACs like these do an extensive amount of polling and survey work and bring in multiple outside advisers to help manage and p...
Mar 20, 2025•55 min•Season 1Ep. 5
We've been wanting to have Terrence Woodbury on the podcast for a long time. The reason is that he's a pollster who has done some amazing work with demographic groups that made a big difference in the presidential race last year, but also in previous cycles: Black voters, voters of color, and younger voters. And if many Democrats were surprised by the erosion in support among what they thought was a reliable Democratic base, Terrence has been observing this slide for years -- particularly among ...
Mar 17, 2025•40 min•Season 1Ep. 5
Last year, as March Madness kicked into gear, there was one athlete everyone seemed to be talking about: Caitlin Clark. The then University of Iowa guard was on her way to leading her team to the NCAA finals, selling out stadiums everywhere she went and creating an unprecedented level of excitement around women's basketball. This interest followed her to the WNBA when she signed with the Indiana Fever. Our guest, USA Today sports columnist Christine Brennan, is writing a book about Caitlin Clark...
Mar 04, 2025•1 hr 2 min•Season 1Ep. 4
This is a special episode in your podcast feed. You are about to hear a recent edition of Editors Roundtable , our Cook Political Report podcast where our team of editors trades behind-the-scenes analysis and dives into the weeds on races and elections. If you're a political junkie - and chances are high that you are if you're listening to this - subscribe to Editors Roundtable today in Apple podcasts for just $1.99 a month. You can also listen by subscribing to the Cook Political Report. On thi...
Feb 20, 2025•30 min•Season 3Ep. 4
Few people in Washington have shaped the political media ecosystem like Chuck Todd. Amy first met Chuck more than 25 years ago when he was the editor of what was then one of the most innovative news media disruptors of its time - The Hotline. The Hotline was political media's first aggregator using the breakthrough technology of the 1990s - the fax machine - as a way to get and distribute local media coverage of campaigns and elections. After helming that publication for years and seeing it thro...
Feb 18, 2025•52 min•Season 1Ep. 1
Whether you expected it or not, it seems pretty safe to say that President Trump's first days have been defined by its intensity, a very fast moving news cycle, and often, the trademark chaos we remember from his first term. And that's why we love conversations like this one with The Wall Street Journal's Molly Ball . She's the kind of journalist who offers clearheaded insight into the many twists and turns and helps us consider the bigger questions we should be asking about what success or fail...
Feb 03, 2025•55 min•Season 3Ep. 2
We are kicking things off with a topic Amy has been fascinated by - the gender divide in American politics and why it’s so pronounced among Gen Z. In the past, young voters have reliably supported the Democratic candidate for president, regardless of gender. Just four years ago, a majority of both young men and young women voted for Joe Biden. But in 2024 the picture looked different. A majority of young women did support Kamala Harris. But a majority of young men cast their vote for Donald Trum...
Jan 21, 2025•42 min•Season 1Ep. 1
We started The Odd Years in 2023, which was both a literal odd numbered year, and also a political odd year; a year when there were no national elections. But Amy enjoyed these conversations so much - and so did you - that we kept going into 2024 even though it was an even year. We just couldn’t help ourselves. As we head into another odd year, we are ready to launch the third season of The Odd Years. As many of you have noted, our title has a few layers of meaning. Odd describes so much happeni...
Jan 16, 2025•1 min•Season 3Ep. 1
For our final show of 2024, we are bringing you a conversation we recorded a couple weeks ago with the Cook Political Report's David Wasserman and the two pollsters who collaborated with the our team on 2024 Swing State Project. We started the project in the spring of 2024 in order to get a deeper understanding of the issues, concerns, and priorities of voters in the seven key battleground states. We teamed up with two amazing pollsters, Patrick Toomey, partner at the Democratic firm BSG, and Gr...
Dec 19, 2024•35 min•Season 1Ep. 1
Americans often say they hate how vitriolic and polarized our politics has become, and yet our current political system helps to promote this very behavior. That's why there's been a push for electoral reforms that incentivize candidates to appeal to voters across the political spectrum instead of just focusing on the most ideological and extreme voices in their party. Reforms like a primary system that all candidates, regardless of party, run on the same ballot, with the top two or more advanci...
Nov 22, 2024•43 min•Season 1Ep. 1
Presidential elections in Wisconsin the last two cycles have been incredibly close. In 2016 and 2020, they were decided by less than one percentage point. Of course, polling in the state has been notoriously "off" - or maybe fickle - which makes it more important than ever to talk to people who have been covering politics in Wisconsin for quite some time and can help us understand the many whims and changes there. That's why we invited Craig Gilbert to talk today. He is a self-described chronicl...
Oct 15, 2024•40 min•Season 2Ep. 10
It's hard to overstate just how important Pennsylvania plays in deciding the Electoral College winner. If Kamala Harris loses the state, she'd need to win North Carolina or Georgia, as well as Nevada and the remaining blue wall states of Wisconsin and Michigan. If Trump were to lose Pennsylvania, he'd need to pick off at least one of those other Midwestern swing states - Michigan or Wisconsin - and would need to win Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, as well as North Carolina. Right now, polling suggests...
Sep 30, 2024•27 min•Season 1Ep. 1
Amy's guest today, Dr. Michael Bitzer, calls North Carolina the "stuck battleground state." That's because Republicans have dominated there in presidential elections. And yet, every four years, Democrats hold out hope that they can turn it blue. Barack Obama did it in 2008, but no other Democrat has done so since. Will 2024 be different? Joe Biden thought he could keep the Tar Heel state in play but as he struggled nationally, his numbers sunk. It's a different story with Kamala Harris at the to...
Sep 19, 2024•46 min•Season 1Ep. 1
Right before President Joe Biden dropped out of the race, his path to victory appeared very narrow. It was: win the midwest states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. But with Kamala Harris now at the top of the ticket, the electoral map could open up for Democrats, and some of those states that Joe Biden won in 2020, but seemed out of reach in 2024, could be back in play. One of those states is Georgia. Biden won narrowly there in 2020 thanks in large part to significant turnout and suppor...
Aug 02, 2024•32 min•Season 1Ep. 1
A special episode of The Odd Years: Amy and David catch up with David Axelrod in Milwaukee at the RNC. The three discuss what they're seeing on the ground, their thoughts on the selection of J.D. Vance as Trump's running mate, and the situation for President Biden and the Democrats as they head into their convention in a few weeks. David Axelrod is the founding director of the Institute of Politics at the University of Chicago; former Chief Strategist and Senior Advisor to President Obama; senio...
Jul 17, 2024•19 min•Season 2Ep. 6
We originally asked our guest today, Michael Podhorzer, to come on to talk about voter demographics. Mike was the longtime political director for the AFL-CIO. He’s now a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and he writes a Substack called Weekend Reading . And Mike has been one of the pioneers in Democratic circles using data and analytics to inform campaign strategy. After we invited him on, President Biden had his terrible debate performance and the entire presidential race took a...
Jul 11, 2024•42 min•Season 2Ep. 5
If you listen to this podcast, you’ve probably heard of the so-called education divide in American politics with those with college degrees increasingly supporting Democrats and liberal causes and those without college degrees, increasingly supporting Republicans and conservative social issues. On today's show, Amy talks with Matt Grossman, Director of the Institute for Public Policy and Social Research and professor of political science at Michigan State University and Dave Hopkins, associate p...
Jun 25, 2024•52 min•Season 1Ep. 4
The Cook Political Report's David Wasserman, Jessica Taylor and Erin Covey answer your mailbag questions this week. They weigh in on what Trump's conviction will mean for Republicans in down-ballot races; they go into the weeds on their process for rating two congressional districts in California; they discuss Senate races in Virginia and Minnesota; and they explain why they don't believe in what some are calling a "reverse coattails" dynamic in the presidential race.
Jun 11, 2024•22 min•Season 2Ep. 5
Donald Trump is very popular in rural America. Drive down a rural stretch of road, and you are still likely to see Trump flags waving in the breeze or the Trump logo painted on the side of a barn. Rural parts of America have always been conservative-leaning. But Republicans now dominate rural politics from the top of the ticket to the bottom. There have been plenty of books written about how and why Republicans, and Trump in particular, have thrived in rural parts of the country. Our guests toda...
May 28, 2024•47 min•Season 2Ep. 5
Amy Walter is joined by her colleague, Cook Political Report Senior Editor and Election Analyst David Wasserman. First, they answer a listener's question on partisan realignment, particularly among education lines. Next, they dive into the question of which House Republicans won by Biden in 2020 are the most endangered. Ask us your questions here or by calling 202-739-8520 (press 8). Remember to say your name and where you are calling from....
May 10, 2024•21 min•Season 2Ep. 4
Amy is back with a conversation about the new show now streaming on Max, The Girls on the Bus. The show stars Melissa Benoist as Sadie McCarthy, a scrappy and ambitious journalist covering a fictional Democratic presidential primary. It follows Sadie and three other women reporters as they navigate the campaign trail, while juggling their careers, personal lives — and relationships with one another. The Girls on the Bus is inspired by the book “Chasing Hillary” by Amy Chozick, a former New York ...
Apr 30, 2024•43 min•Season 2Ep. 3
Amy sits down with her Cook Political Report colleague, Senior Editor & Elections Analyst David Wasserman, for a walk down memory lane. In honor of The Cook Political Report's 40th Anniversary, David selected the defining House races of every cycle since 1984. Amy and Dave reminisce about the names, faces, issues, and districts that have shaped congressional politics over the past 40 years. Read Dave's full report here....
Apr 16, 2024•34 min•Season 2Ep. 2
