The Playbook Podcast

Let’s state the obvious: John Fetterman struggled to effectively communicate during his one and only Senate debate with Mehmet Oz Tuesday in Harrisburg. 

We don’t usually dwell on a single debate in a single race, but this one is different. Control of the Senate, and the future of policymaking in Washington, may hinge on the outcome of the Fetterman-Oz race.

The conventional wisdom over the summer was that Oz was a deeply flawed candidate who couldn’t win, but the race is a toss-up. Republicans just decided to pour an additional $6 million into Pennsylvania to help Oz. “We believe if we win Pennsylvania, we win the majority,” Steven Law, who runs the most important Senate GOP super PAC, told POLITICO Tuesday.

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Raghu Manavalan is the Host of POLITICO's Playbook Daily Briefing.
Jenny Ament is the Executive Producer of POLITICO Audio.

“For some of Ukraine’s most ardent backers, even talking about diplomacy amounts to appeasement,” Gideon Rachman, the chief foreign affairs columnist for the Financial Times, noted last week.

Thirty House Democrats led by Congressional Progressive Caucus chair Pramila Jayapal learned this lesson the hard way on Monday, after they sent President Joe Biden what they believed was a nuanced and carefully worded letter endorsing direct diplomacy with Russia to end the war in Ukraine. 

They condemned Russia’s “outrageous and illegal invasion of Ukraine,” reiterated their support for “a free and independent Ukraine,” and they were clear that American “military and economic support” should continue. Unlike House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy, they did not hint at voting against future aid packages.

But their use of the D word precipitated a torrent of criticism — mostly from fellow Democrats — that had some of them backtracking within hours. (In one notable example, former CPC co-chair MARK POCAN told a constituent the missive was written amid different circumstances in July, adding, “I have no idea why it went out now. Bad timing.”)

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Raghu Manavalan is the Host of POLITICO's Playbook Daily Briefing.
Jenny Ament is the Executive Producer of POLITICO Audio.
 

15 days left until Election Day. … 7,501,492 early votes already cast as of 10:20 p.m. Sunday, per the United States Elections Project.

And Playbook editor Mike Debonis and deputy editor Zack Stanton preview the packed debate schedule around the country, including the highly anticipated debate between Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman and Mehmet Oz on Tuesday. 

Plus, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis endorsement of Colorado Republican Joe O'Dea is a notable boost for the moderate and a sharp contrast with Trump, who blasted O’Dea in a feud last week. “A BIG MISTAKE!” Trump responded on Truth Social.

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Raghu Manavalan is the Host of POLITICO's Playbook Daily Briefing.
Jenny Ament is the Executive Producer of POLITICO Audio.

Our colleague Natalie Allison got her hands on some new polling data out of Nevada that shows the closely watched race between Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto and Republican Adam Laxalt tightening even further. “Laxalt has inched ahead of Cortez Masto by 2 percentage points, within the poll’s margin of error, a gain from a month ago when he was down 3 percentage points, according to a poll conducted this week by the conservative Club for Growth and shared exclusively with POLITICO.”

And even as the national trend seems to have tilted in the GOP’s favor in recent days, Alaska’s independents seem poised to swing dramatically toward the Democrats — and that could be an ominous sign for Republicans throughout the nation, David Siders reports from Wasilla.

There’s a reason White House chief of staff RON KLAIN checks AAA’s survey of gas prices every single morning.

For all the well-informed punditry about whether this or that issue will be the terrain upon which 2022 rises and falls, today — with 19 days left until Election Day — it seems that the most salient issue in the election for most voters could be pretty straightforward: It’s the gas prices, stupid.

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Raghu Manavalan is the Host of POLITICO's Playbook Daily Briefing.
Jenny Ament is the Executive Producer of POLITICO Audio.

We have fresh data this morning from the new POLITICO-Morning Consult poll that shows the national political landscape is shifting more firmly toward the Republican Party.

Twenty days out from Election Day, voters are overwhelmingly focused on the economy and inflation, Republicans are more trusted to handle those issues, and crime beats out abortion as a second-tier issue. In our poll, as in others, the GOP has also gained on the congressional ballot test.

The poll confirms the dramatic shift from the late summer, when the Dobbs decision and declining gas prices strengthened Democrats in races across the country, to today, when the midterms seem to be returning to a more typical referendum on the incumbent president in which the party out of power makes substantial gains.

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Raghu Manavalan is the Host of POLITICO's Playbook Daily Briefing.
Jenny Ament is the Executive Producer of POLITICO Audio.

Two must-read books that vastly add to our understanding of the Trump era go on sale today: Rachael and Karoun Demirjian’s “Unchecked: The Untold Story Behind Congress's Botched Impeachments of Donald Trump” ($28) and Robert Draper’s “Weapons of Mass Delusion: When the Republican Party Lost Its Mind” ($29). 

There are meaty new excerpts out from both — starting with “The Problem of Marjorie Taylor Greene,” Draper’s NYT Mag piece on the far-right Georgia congresswoman’s rise and what it means for a likely GOP House majority.

One of the most-retweeted quotes in the piece is this warning from Greene to Rep. Kevin McCarthy: “‘I think that to be the best speaker of the House and to please the base, he’s going to give me a lot of power and a lot of leeway,’ she predicted in a flat, unemotional voice. ‘And if he doesn’t, they’re going to be very unhappy about it. I think that’s the best way to read that. And that’s not in any way a threat at all. I just think that’s reality.’”

Deeper in the story, Greene gets more specific: She tells Draper she wants a seat on the high-profile House Oversight and Judiciary committees.

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Raghu Manavalan is the Host of POLITICO's Playbook Daily Briefing.
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We definitely have Georgia on our minds here at Playbook. The Senate race in the Peach State — pitting Sen. Raphael Warnock against football legend Herschel Walker — is likely the most consequential Senate race on the map this year. Early voting begins today.

There’s nothing better as a reporter than getting out of the swamp to see what voters are thinking and saying for yourself — so Playbook's Eugene Daniels headed to Atlanta for a check-in. In a special dispatch after his trip, Eugene chats with Playbook Deputy Editor Zack Stanton about what he found.

There's a sense that the scandal-ridden Walker is sucking up all the political oxygen in the state. Even Warnock campaign aides admit surprise when reporters call to talk about the sitting senator and not about Walker’s travails.

In a story out this morning, Eugene explores how Warnock is a man in two worlds. At Ebenezer, no one calls him “senator.” It’s “reverend,” and members of his flock will correct you immediately. But while he enjoys a deep connection with his congregation, some Black political strategists worry that Warnock has not yet secured the broad support he’ll need from Black voters to earn a full term.

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Raghu Manavalan is the Host of POLITICO's Playbook Daily Briefing.
Jenny Ament is the Executive Producer of POLITICO Audio.

For a minute there, Donald Trump wasn’t the dominant political story. In between peak coverage in August of the FBI’s search of his Mar-a-Lago home and Thursday’s public vote by the Jan. 6 committee to subpoena the former president, there were long stretches when Trump wasn’t the main character of the midterms.

In some ways he still isn’t. As NYT’s Blake Hounshell and Alyce McFadden point out, Jan. 6 “is practically invisible on the nation’s airwaves, despite nearly a billion dollars in overall ad spending this year.” POLITICO’s Jordain Carney, Sarah Ferris, and Ally Mutnick note that “Democrats have aired just two dozen spots focused on threats to democracy this cycle, in roughly 16 different battleground districts.” 

But even if he didn’t appear in a single ad — and there are plenty that include him —  Trump still looms over everything in politics.

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Raghu Manavalan is the Host of POLITICO's Playbook Daily Briefing.
Jenny Ament is the Executive Producer of POLITICO Audio.

Since the very first hearing of the House Jan. 6 committee, the panel has vowed to do three things: (1) correct the historical record of the aftermath of the 2020 election; (2) present the case that former President Donald Trump was at the center of a scheme to overturn the results of a free and fair election; and (3) outline an ongoing attack on American democracy. 

This afternoon, they’re set to tie all three together in what is expected to be the committee’s final televised hearing. 

The hearing itself will “feature evidence that Trump’s allies were pushing him to declare victory on Election Day 2020 even before the votes were counted, and that Trump was warned of the unfolding violence at the Capitol before he tweeted an inflammatory attack on then-Vice President Mike Pence,” as our Nicholas Wu and Kyle Cheney write in their preview this morning.

But of perhaps equal importance is the hearing’s place in the broader arc of post-insurrection Washington. 

And FDA reporter Katherine Foley joins the show for this week's astrology readings.

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Raghu Manavalan is the Host of POLITICO's Playbook Daily Briefing.
Jenny Ament is the Executive Producer of POLITICO Audio.