"We've become the crossing guard party." A Conversation with Pod Save America's Dan Pfeiffer.
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.Sign up for our free weekly newsletter, In Brief: https://www.cookpolitical.com/in-brief-sign-upLearn more about The Cook Political Report: www.cookpolitical.com/subscribe
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39:30
Rahm Emanuel Has a Message for Democrats
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. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter, In Brief: https://www.cookpolitical.com/in-brief-sign-upLearn more about The Cook Political Report: www.cookpolitical.com/subscribe
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47:02
Republican Strategist and Podcaster Josh Holmes on the Midterms, Tariffs and Why Authenticity Matters
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. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter, In Brief: https://www.cookpolitical.com/in-brief-sign-upLearn more about The Cook Political Report: www.cookpolitical.com/subscribe
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48:08
"Trump voters are starting to ask questions." Pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson on 100 days.
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.Sign up for our free weekly newsletter, In Brief: https://www.cookpolitical.com/in-brief-sign-upLearn more about The Cook Political Report: www.cookpolitical.com/subscribe
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46:34
By this measure, America is actually a little less polarized these days
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. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter, In Brief: https://www.cookpolitical.com/in-brief-sign-upRead Dave’s Cook PVI analysis: https://www.cookpolitical.com/cook-pvi/introducing-2025-cook-partisan-voting-index-slightly-depolarizing-electionLearn more about The Cook Political Report: www.cookpolitical.com/subscribe
Join Amy Walter, the celebrated editor-in-chief of the Cook Political Report, every other Tuesday, for conversations on the surprising — and often odd — times we live in. Amy brings her smart and sought-after insights on politics to a podcast that covers a range of subjects.
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