In off-the-record conversations and private emails, AFL-CIO political director Michael Podhorzer argued that the pundits focusing exclusively on the fundamentals of the race — Biden’s approval rating and the dismal economic indicators — were missing the bigger picture. Yes, presidents usually lose an average of some two dozen House seats in similar circumstances, but that wasn’t the whole story.

While many analysts argued that inflation would be more important than the diffuse issue of democracy, Podhorzer said that was myopic. He was much more right than wrong.

Podhorzer has now left the AFL-CIO after 25 years and is able to speak freely. On this episode of Playbook Deep Dive, host Ryan Lizza sits down with him in his kitchen for his first wide-ranging interview. They talk about what everyone got wrong about 2022, his critiques of the media’s coverage of the right, his ongoing battles with the so-called popularists in the Democratic Party, and why Podhorzer already thinks the presidential election of 2024 is headed for a dangerous endgame.

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Rep. Bob Good (R-Va.) and his allies are trying to end Kevin McCarthy’s reign as leader of the House Republicans. Good is one of five Republicans in the far-right Freedom Caucus vowing to block McCarthy’s path to the 218 votes needed to become Speaker of the House. The two have a history.

In 2020, Good was running for Congress to represent Virginia’s 5th Congressional District. Incidentally, also home to the race between James Madison and James Monroe to be the district’s first representative in Congress. Madison won. While Good was running for Congress, Kevin McCarthy tried to consolidate power in the Republican House conference on his way to becoming Speaker. During his campaign, Good knocked out one of McCarthy’s loyal member’s at the GOP nominating convention. At a private meeting recently, Good and McCarthy had a heated exchange about events at the time.

On this episode of Playbook Deep Dive, Playbook co-author Rachael Bade went to the Hill to meet Good at his office and dig for details on the history of his relationship with McCarthy and whom Good and his allies intended to support for Speaker instead.

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Department of Energy announced a breakthrough in the decades-long quest to recreate on Earth the process that powers the Sun: nuclear fusion. To simplify slightly, scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California recently fired a bunch of lasers at a piece of hydrogen. The lasers used 2.05 megajoules of energy to hit the hydrogen. The resulting reaction produced 3 megajoules of energy.

For the first time in the history of fusion research, scientists achieved ignition — more energy was produced by the reaction than was used to create it. Here in Washington, and the world of politics, no elected official was as excited about these results as Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.).

Beyer is the former lieutenant governor of Virginia and was an ambassador in the Obama administration. A few years ago, Beyer became consumed with the promise of fusion. How it could become a cheap and plentiful alternative to fossil fuels. How it could solve the climate crisis.

In this episode of Playbook Deep Dive, host Ryan Lizza joins Congressman Beyer to explore the policy and politics of this big scientific breakthrough. Is it the turning point we’ve been promised for decades, or will it once again lead to the same dashed expectations that has long-characterized the history of fusion research?

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Gov. Chris Sununu was recently re-elected to his fourth term in office. The Republican governor has been positioning himself for the 2024 presidential primaries for a while now. 

Before Election Day, there were a lot of reasons to be skeptical about his chances. He’s a New England moderate in the party of MAGA. He endorsed DONALD TRUMP twice, but he’s also been a stinging critic. And he’s pro-choice, which might be seen as a non-starter in a GOP primary.

Trump’s recent decline has emboldened his potential competitors. The underwhelming results for Republicans in the 2022 midterms have led to an outbreak of interest on the right in electability. 

Now Sununu is trying to define himself against not just Trump, but many of the right’s obsessions that he sees as political losers. On this week’s episode of Playbook Deep Dive, host and Playbook co-author Ryan Lizza went to the statehouse in Concord, NH, where Sununu was keen to discuss 2024 presidential primary politics in a way that he hasn’t recently. 

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Michael Bennet is the senior Democratic senator from Colorado, a famously purple state. In the weeks leading up to the 2022 midterms, Colorado seemed to be a place where Republicans might flip a few seats. But as it turned out, not only was there no red wave in Colorado, there was something of a blue wave instead. On this episode of Playbook Deep Dive, host Ryan Lizza visits Sen. Michael Bennet on the Hill to dissect the 2022 midterms and pick his brain on 2024 presidential campaigns and what might be in store for the lame-duck session.

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There are some members of Congress who have famously struggled to understand the online world. Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) prides himself on not only understanding the internet, but also for passing some of the key legislation that he likes to say helped lay the foundation for the digital revolution.

More recently, Markey has been leading fights to enhance online privacy and regulate social media. So when Elon Musk took over Twitter recently, Markey was paying close attention to see what kinds of changes the richest man in the world might bring to the platform. 

The two men have a little history: they previously tussled over safety issues with self-driving technology in Musk’s Tesla electric vehicles. The Muskification of Twitter was equally concerning to the senator. But it was when Musk unveiled a plan to sell blue check marks — the Twitter verification symbol that prevents users from masquerading as other people and corporations — that Markey started to get really worried. What followed turned Markey into Musk’s chief tormentor in Washington. 

In this week’s Playbook Deep Dive, host and Playbook co-author Ryan Lizza went up to Sen. Markey’s office on Capitol Hill to find out what it’s like to be in a Twitter war with the self described chief twit, and what might come next in this escalating confrontation.  

Ryan Lizza is a Playbook co-author for POLITICO.
Senator Ed Markey is a Democratic senator from Massachusetts.
Afra Abdullah is associate producer for POLITICO audio.
Kara Tabor is a producer for POLITICO audio.
Brook Hayes is senior editor for POLITICO audio.
Adam Allington is senior producer for POLITICO audio.
Jenny Ament is executive producer for POLITICO audio.

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Why were Democrats seemingly able to by and large defy history and avoid a catastrophic result in the midterms? Across the country, Democrats successfully defended seats that Republicans had confidently expected to pick up, while also adding wins in gubernatorial races in five swing states that flipped from Trump to Biden in 2020.

There are many explanations: backlash to the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, exhaustion with Donald Trump and some of the candidates that he backed, and a big turnout for Democrats among Gen Z and millennials. The coalition of voters that turned out to oppose Donald Trump in 2018 and 2020 remained largely intact in 2022.

There were also a lot of races that turned on local issues where none of these common explanations seem to tell the full story. We’re all going to be unpacking the results for a while. So, we wanted to hear why these Democrats think they were able to defy history. On this week’s episode of Playbook Deep Dive, Ohioan and POLITICO Playbook co-author Rachael Bade talked to Greg Landsman, a Democrat who on Tuesday, ousted 13-term incumbent Republican Rep. Steve Chabot in Ohio’s 1st District.

Ryan Lizza is a Playbook co-author for POLITICO.
Greg Landsman is the representative-elect for Ohio's 1st Congressional district.
Afra Abdullah is associate producer for POLITICO audio.
Kara Tabor is a producer for POLITICO audio.
Brook Hayes is senior editor for POLITICO audio.
Adam Allington is senior producer for POLITICO audio.
Jenny Ament is executive producer for POLITICO audio.

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Simon Rosenberg is the head of the progressive think tank NDN, and he has a message for jittery Democrats on the eve of the midterms: cheer up! This week on the Playbook Deep Dive podcast we sit down with the Democratic Party’s apostle of optimism.

“I'm not sitting here and telling you we're going to win,” Simon told us over lunch this week. “What I'm telling you is that the narrative about this election, about there being a red wave— there isn't one. There never has been.”

If you spend a lot of time on political Twitter, you have no doubt encountered Simon’s tweets and threads over the last few weeks. He’s built a large and loyal following of Democrats looking for silver linings amid the clouds of negative media coverage about their party’s prospects in the midterms.

— Hispanics abandoning his party? Simon says that NDN’s polling doesn’t show it.

— Polling averages tilting to the GOP in the last few weeks? Simon says they’ve been polluted by a barrage of Republican polls dumped strategically to depress Democrats and excite Republicans. (This claim has been met with a lot of skepticism, because surely Democratic campaigns would be leaking their own internals, but we digress…)

— And that red wave? Simon says that if you look at the Kansas abortion referendum, the five House special elections earlier this year, and especially the early voting data, that the anti-Trump coalition that powered Democrats to victory in 2018 and 2020 is holding strong in 2022.

Ryan Lizza is a Playbook co-author for POLITICO.
Simon Rosenberg is president of NDN. 
Afra Abdullah is associate producer for POLITICO audio.
Kara Tabor is producer for POLITICO audio.
Brook Hayes is senior editor for POLITICO audio.
Adam Allington is senior producer for POLITICO audio.
Jenny Ament is executive producer for POLITICO audio.

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Dan Conston is the president of the Congressional Leadership Fund, the super PAC aligned with Rep. Kevin McCarthy with the singular mission of making the California Republican Speaker of the House. Most forecasts suggest that Conston and CLF are on the verge of success.

In a candid hour-plus interview, Conston took Playbook behind the scenes of CLF’s operation. We talked about the issues and demographics of this election, emerging GOP opportunities in the final days of the campaign and the inside strategies that one of the best-funded super PACs in American politics uses to take down its Democratic opponents.

Ryan Lizza is a Playbook co-author for POLITICO.
Dan Conston is the president of the Congressional Leadership Fund.
Afra Abdullah is associate producer for POLITICO audio.
Kara Tabor is producer for POLITICO audio.
Brook Hayes is senior editor for POLITICO audio.
Adam Allington is senior producer for POLITICO audio.
Jenny Ament is executive producer for POLITICO audio.

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