The Odd Years

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 ...

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 diff...

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 tu...

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 h...

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 ...

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...

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 R...

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...

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 ...

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...

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 co...

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 ca...

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 elect...

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 ...

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 Ha...

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...

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 pollst...

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...

Presidential elections in Wisconsin the last two cycles have been incredibly close. In 2016 and 2020, they were decided by less than one percentage point. Of course, polling in the state has been notoriously "off" - or maybe fickle - which makes it more important than ever to talk to people who have been covering politics in Wisconsin for quite some time and can help us understand the many whims and changes there. That's why we inv...