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 produce campaign ads and other material.

What makes Future Forward unique is the tremendous amount of survey data and ad testing that they do. Its team of data scientists surveyed millions of voters and tested thousands of ads with the goal of finding and airing the ads that moved the needle the most with the voters.

During 2024, the group poured more than $600 million dollars into ads that supported first Joe Biden and then Kamala Harris' campaign for president.

At the end of the day, the Trump campaign's advertising and media strategy was more successful, particularly his ability to connect with younger men via social media platforms like podcasts and YouTube.

As the Democratic party struggles to find its footing, we wanted to talk to Chauncey McLean about what he learned from Harris' loss and how Democratic groups like his are adapting to this fractured media environment going forward.

We recorded the conversation on Wednesday, March 19th.

To learn more about The Cook Political Report go to: www.cookpolitical.com/subscribe.

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 men of color, a group he calls the new swing voter. As a pollster to the Kamala Harris campaign, he and his company HIT Strategies, had a front row seat to how voters felt about Harris, Donald Trump, and the Democratic party as a whole.

So we wanted to ask Terrance to discuss the results of the 2024 election, but also look forward to what he's hearing now from voters with Donald Trump in office and what he thinks the Democratic response should be to the Trump era.

Terrence Woodbury is cofounder and president of HIT Strategies which is a public opinion research firm.

We recorded this conversation on Wednesday, March 12.

To learn more about The Cook Political Report go to: www.cookpolitical.com/subscribe

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 called On Her Game, which tells the story of Clark's rise to become the most famous female team sport athlete in history.

Christine has been a long-time chronicler and advocate for women in sports. She's also deeply interested in politics and has a keen understanding and appreciation for how sports and politics intersect.

We wanted to have Christine on to help tell the story of how laws like Title IX helped pave the way for a phenom like Caitlin Clark. And we also wanted Christine to reflect on where we are today when it comes to politics, sports and gender.

These three topics have always been intertwined in our culture, but the Trump era has brought it to a different level. In Trump’s first few weeks in office alone he appeared at the Super Bowl and signed an executive order banning transgender athletes from competing in women’s athletics. We also had Canadians booing the U.S. national anthem at an international hockey game in response to Trump's tariff threats as well as his references to annexing our northern neighbor.

Christine Brennan is an award-winning national sports columnist for USA Today. She's a commentator for CNN, ABC News, and PBS NewsHour. Her book about Caitlin Clark is available right now for preorder on Amazon. It will be available wherever books are sold in early July.

Pre-order Christine Brennan's book: https://www.amazon.com/Her-Game-Caitlin-Revolution-Womens/dp/1668090198

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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 this episode, Amy Walter, Erin Covey, and Matthew Klein take a look at our new 2026 House Race Ratings. They go over why these ratings look they way they do right now and explain why they will change over the next 21 months before election day. They also talk about which races they had disagreements over. In two cases, those races fell in districts that have been moving to the right.

To read about our 2026 House Race Ratings and see where each race stands go to: www.cookpolitical.com/subscribe

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 through the Internet era, Chuck went over to a more traditional media institution, NBC News. But he brought his entrepreneurship with him, starting a daily MSNBC show that was modeled in many ways on The Hotline style of bringing campaigns and elections to the center of the conversation.

He became a household name in 2014 when he took the role of moderator on Meet the Press. He helped expand the footprint of the show to include a daily program, a podcast, and a blog.

He stepped down from that role in 2023 and recently announced he would leave NBC News.

Covering Washington looks a lot different now than when Chuck first started out, and he has had a front row seat to all of these changes. So we wanted to talk to him about political journalism today, covering Trump 2.0, and his own plans for what might come up next.

We recorded this conversation on Wednesday, February 12th.

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 failure might look like for Trump this time around.

So we wanted to have Molly on to give us some context for these early days of Trump's second term. But we also wanted to ask her about how she approaches her job of political storytelling - especially when it involves accessing some of our highest profile politicians - which is what she did when she wrote a book about Nancy Pelosi a few years back.

Molly Ball is The Wall Street Journal senior political correspondent. You can check out her podcast, Trump 2.0, which comes out every Friday for the first 100 days of the second Trump administration.

Molly is also the author of Pelosi, a biography of Nancy Pelosi, the first woman Speaker of the House.

We recorded this conversation on Wednesday, January 29th at 10:30am

To learn more about The Cook Political Report go to www.cookpolitical.com/subscribe

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 Trump. In fact, 56% of young men voted for Trump compared to only 4% of young women.

None of this was a surprise to Daniel Cox, our guest today. He’s been watching this gender divergence unfold for years now, and he says it’s happening on so many levels: that gender informs Gen Z’s views on a range of issues from social, to culture to, of course, political.

So Amy wanted to talk to him about why this is, will it last, and what's making this cohort so different from previous generations.

Daniel Cox is Director of the Survey Center on American Life and a senior fellow in polling and public opinion at the American Enterprise Institute. He is the author of the forthcoming book, Uncoupled, which will focus on the growing gender gap in American society. He also writes the Substack American Storylines.

To learn more about The Cook Political Report go to: www.cookpolitical.com/subscribe

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 happening in our world now, and we'll get into that with our guests. What's making the times we live in interesting, unpredictable, surprising?

Amy will talk to people who live and breathe politics (like ourselves) and plenty who do not. So be sure to follow and listen in.

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 Greg Strimple, president of GS Strategy Group, a Republican polling company.

What we really loved about working with Greg and Patrick and their teams is that these are campaign pollsters. They understand the dynamics involved, not just in what voters are saying, but also how candidates and campaigns would respond to them.

We conducted three surveys with Greg and Patrick, one in May, one in August, right after Kamala Harris replaced Joe Biden on the top of the ticket, and a final one in September. You can find all of those at here along with our analysis.

The one consistent theme we saw throughout those three polls was that voters' concern about the state of the economy and inflation dominated even as events like Biden's last minute dropping out and an assassination attempt on Trump roiled the campaign.

So Amy started this conversation with Dave, Greg, and Patrick by asking: even though Kamala Harris was able to narrow the gap on economic issues from where Joe Biden stood earlier in the year, in the end, was this simply it's an economy stupid election?

**We're excited that we'll be back in 2025 with a brand new season. Our guests will include people who live and breathe politics - like us! - and plenty who do not. We'll be back soon in the New Year, but for now, enjoy our final show of 2024.**

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 advancing to the general election. Another reform is ranked choice voting, which asks voters to rank their pick of candidates in order of preference.

The thinking behind these ideas is that the American public is less divided than the elected officials we send to congress, and that makes it harder to pass legislation that many people actually support. So if there's a way to run our elections so that candidates didn't have to appeal to the more extreme elements of their parties, shouldn't we move towards that kind of system? That all sounds like something voters would like to see, right?

Reformers thought so too. And in 2024, they helped get ranked choice voting on the ballot in a bunch of states like Colorado, Nevada, Oregon, and Idaho, as well as Washington, DC. But while Americans are quite unhappy with how politics and governing worked these days, these reforms ultimately were rejected in almost all the places where they appeared on the ballot.

Why was that? We asked Nick Troiano to join Amy on the podcast to help answer this question and learn more about where the electoral reform movement goes next. Nick has long been a part of the electoral reform movement. He's the executive director of Unite America, a nonpartisan election reform organization.

He's also the author of The Primary Solution: Rescuing Our Democracy From The Fringes.