The Odd Years

This week we are diverging from our normal Odd Years format to introduce you to another Cook Political Report product, Editors Roundtable.

This podcast features a rotating cast of our Cook Political Report team breaking down the latest news, analysis and insights about the most important House, Senate and Gubernatorial contests in the country.

We like to think of this podcast as an opportunity for you to get the behind the scenes access to the conversations we are having at our weekly Cook Political Report editorial meetings.

This week, our talented colleagues talk about the most interesting and consequential state in the 2026 midterms: Michigan. The Wolverine state has it all; a three-way gubernatorial contest featuring the former Democratic Mayor of Detroit, who is running as an Independent; competitive primaries for one of the most competitive Senate races in the country, and a slew of critical House contests that could determine control of Congress next year. And, we can’t have a conversation about Michigan without using a mitt (in this case our Managing Editor’s own oven mitt), to help illustrate where each important congressional district and key cities are located in the state. That “U” shape between the thumb and index finger, that’s Detroit, BTW.

We hope you enjoy this episode. And, more importantly, if you do like it, and to hear more of it, subscribe to the Cook Political Report where you can get the kind of deeply sourced, non-partisan and accurate analysis of every race up in 2025 and 2026.

Go to: www.cookpolitical.com/subscribe.

Listeners can use the discount code"ODD10" to save 10% on any subscription. This offer is available only to new subscribers.

You can also get Editors Roundtable for just $1.99 a month on Apple podcast.

Read Jessica on Michigan's open Senate seat here: https://www.cookpolitical.com/analysis/senate/michigan-senate/republicans-aim-avoid-messy-michigan-senate-primary-may-not-get

Read Erin's 2026 House analysis here: https://www.cookpolitical.com/analysis/house/michigan-house/2026-michigan-house-analysis-democrats-fight-upper-hand

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 Socialist who has little experience politically but a knack for social media. He also happens to have the support of another young, well known New York City liberal, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez.

In some ways, this race is very New York City with storylines that could only happen there. In fact, the New York Times asked the all- important “what's your bagel order” question. But there are also shades of the tension in national Democratic politics between the more pragmatic and more progressive wings of the party happening in this race.

Plus, Donald Trump, an outsized influence in and on the city, is a big factor here as well.

To make sense of it all, I sat down with Nick Fandos, who's covering every twist and turn of this race for The New York Times. He's the city's politics and government reporter.

Early voting has already started, and the primary is on Tuesday, June 24th. We recorded this conversation on Wednesday, June 18th.

You can watch part of the conversation our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@thecookpoliticalreport

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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 played and will he play in continuing to lobby Congress? And will the BBB move fast enough to be on President Trump’s desk by July fourth? (Spoiler alert: it will not.)

Amy put all these questions to Leigh Ann Caldwell, chief Washington correspondent for Puck.

A quick note: we recorded this conversation on Wednesday, June 4th, as the Elon Musk and President Trump breakup was beginning, but before it burst into the full view. And it appears the falling out has been driven, at least in part, over Musk's opposition to the Big Beautiful Bill. But as Amy has said, she doesn't believe this changes the calculus for Congressional Republicans.

You can watch part of the conversation our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@thecookpoliticalreport

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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, as a former Obama senior adviser, Amy wanted to ask his thoughts on the new reporting coming out about Joe Biden's health and how his inner circle worked to conceal it.

In addition to that, we received an important report from the data firm Catalist about 2024 voters, shedding more light on why Kamala Harris lost and Donald Trump won. As a fellow data nerd, I knew Dan would be ready to dive into it.

We recorded this on Wednesday, May 21st.

You can watch our entire conversation on our YouTube channel.

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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 Trump 2.0? How does the party recover from 2024 and prepare for 2028? What does a successful midterm strategy look like in 2026? And given his own, let's say, active media schedule, what are his own plans for the future?

He came on to talk to Amy about all that.

We recorded this conversation on Wednesday, May 14th.

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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 public affairs firm, Cavalry, and he's still actively giving advice to Republican candidates.

Josh's two roles as a member of the new media and a seasoned Republican political hand gives him unique perspective into our current political era.

This conversation spans a similar gamut from what advice he'd give to down ballot Republicans for the upcoming midterms to his thoughts on the Trump tariff endgame. Josh also talks about how candidates can best navigate the new media landscape.

We recorded this conversation on Wednesday, May 7th.

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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 day polls were released this past weekend. That's why you won't hear us asking her about these polls.

But the reason we wanted to have Kristen on in the first place was that we didn't want to get caught up in the immediate set of data. We wanted Kristen to do what she does best which is to filter the signal from the noise, present a 30,000 view of the political environment rather than focusing on the minutiae or just small movements in data. What we like about Kristen so much is that she's able to to toggle seamlessly between reading cross tabs but also probing voters in focus groups and really listening to what they are saying or not saying, and then explaining it to regular people in a way that is approachable but not condescending.

That's why we were especially excited to talk with her about a presidency as complicated and unprecedented as Trump's.

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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 one that was blue or blue leaning?

Thus was born the Cook PVI, which stands for Partisan Voting Index. And since 1998, CPR has released a new addition every two years.

This admittedly very geeky undertaking is also something we get really excited about because it cannot only tell us the partisanship of every district, but with more than 25 years of data, we can see how districts have shifted over the years.

The person behind the Cook PVI and how it all works is David Wasserman, The Cook Political Report’s senior editor and elections analyst.

We invited him on to explain what the Cook PVI is, how we calculate it, what we learned from it for 2025, and what it may tell us about elections in 2026.

We recorded this conversation on Wednesday, April 9th.

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Read Dave’s Cook PVI analysis: https://www.cookpolitical.com/cook-pvi/introducing-2025-cook-partisan-voting-index-slightly-depolarizing-election

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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 Donald Trump about the ad making process and strategy, which he shares with us here in colorful detail - like what it's like to work on the Trump campaign and, specifically, to work with the president when putting these messages and ads together.

We also wanted to talk to John about whether the lessons he learned working for Trump could translate to non-Trump candidates and Republican downballot candidates who have to run in the 2026 midterms.

This conversation was recorded on Wednesday, April 2nd.

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.

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