The Chuck ToddCast

Chuck Todd opens with Saturday’s fourth No Kings rally and the question of whether protest energy converts to turnout — noting the movement may now be more credible with voters than the Democratic Party itself. Then the story out of Pensacola Beach: ICE confronted four roofers repairing Hurricane Isaias damage at the Grand Marlin, and the men refused to come down until agents left, sending their paperwork down instead. ...

Dr. Ayanna Howard — the former NASA JPL roboticist who became Spelman College’s 12th president in August — joins the Chuck ToddCast to argue America needs a dedicated federal agency to oversee AI, regulated by specialty rather than treated as one monolithic technology. Her warning is pragmatic: without guardrails, the backlash after an inevitable bad event will be enormous. She explains why there is no such thing ...

Chuck Todd opens with Saturday’s fourth No Kings rally and the question of whether protest energy converts to turnout — noting the movement may now be more credible with voters than the Democratic Party itself. Then the story out of Pensacola Beach: ICE confronted four roofers repairing Hurricane Isaias damage at the Grand Marlin, and the men refused to come down until agents left, sending their paperwork down instead. ...

Chuck Todd maps a map that keeps getting worse for Republicans: they’re not defending Trump, and they’re trying to convince voters they aren’t Trump Republicans. Ohio is the firewall and the money is pouring in, while the GOP plays triage in Nebraska, Kansas, Iowa and South Carolina and pulls funding from House incumbents. Chuck sees no sign of a blue mirage — consumer confidence is lower than at any point u...

Chuck Todd maps a map that keeps getting worse for Republicans: they’re not defending Trump, and they’re trying to convince voters they aren’t Trump Republicans. Ohio is the firewall and the money is pouring in, while the GOP plays triage in Nebraska, Kansas, Iowa and South Carolina and pulls funding from House incumbents. Chuck sees no sign of a blue mirage — consumer confidence is lower than at any point u...

Washington Monthly editor-in-chief Paul Glastris joins the Chuck ToddCast to make the case that the entire college rankings industry is measuring the wrong thing. U.S. News rewards wealth, prestige, and exclusivity — guaranteeing the same 20 or 30 schools top the list every year, institutions 95% of students can’t get into anyway. The Monthly ranks on what colleges actually do for the country, and this year debuted the ...

Three weeks out from the midterms, the richest man on earth spent a weekend laundering a fabricated story about a Senate candidate’s mental health into the mainstream — and Chuck Todd and Chris Cillizza argue the desperation of it is the tell. They open on the smear campaign against James Talarico in Texas (PolitiFact rated it Pants on Fire; the Ohio facility at the center of it publicly stated he was never a patient), ...

Three weeks out, Chuck Todd reads a Pew survey that gives Republicans nothing: Trump at 30% approval — his lowest of the second term and on par with where he sat after January 6th — Democrats up 44-36 on the generic ballot, and 44% of voters describing their vote as a vote against Trump. The enthusiasm gap is the number Todd keeps returning to, and his argument is that we may still be underestimating the size of this wa...

Three weeks out, Chuck Todd reads a Pew survey that gives Republicans nothing: Trump at 30% approval — his lowest of the second term and on par with where he sat after January 6th — Democrats up 44-36 on the generic ballot, and 44% of voters describing their vote as a vote against Trump. The enthusiasm gap is the number Todd keeps returning to, and his argument is that we may still be underestimating the size of this wa...

AEI senior fellow James Pethokoukis — author of the Faster, Please! newsletter — joins the Chuck ToddCast to argue that America’s AI anxiety is the predictable product of two decades of shocks landing on an economy that’s been weak by historical standards. His central political point cuts against his own side of the argument: telling voters their fear is irrational is the worst possible strategy, and Silicon...

Dmitri Mehlhorn — Democratic strategist, Atoll Society co-founder, and author of the new novel Archipelago of Light — joins the Chuck ToddCast to walk through the war games he runs simulating a contested 2028 election. Three teams: Institutionalists, Nationalists, and Capitalists. The Nationalists win a lot of them, and the mechanics are grimly instructive — they pump up progressives to generate backlash, offer ca...

Chuck Todd opens with the Wall Street Journal's brutal profile of Scott Bessent — built on 30-plus interviews describing outbursts, a thrown briefing book he denies, and seven Senate-confirmed officials out the door when previous administrations lost zero to two. The 3-3-3 plan never materialized, the debt cleared $40 trillion, and Trump keeps giving him more. Chuck's read: the whole Cabinet has become mini-Trumps. He then ge...

Chuck Todd opens with the Wall Street Journal's brutal profile of Scott Bessent — built on 30-plus interviews describing outbursts, a thrown briefing book he denies, and seven Senate-confirmed officials out the door when previous administrations lost zero to two. The 3-3-3 plan never materialized, the debt cleared $40 trillion, and Trump keeps giving him more. Chuck's read: the whole Cabinet has become mini-Trumps. He then ge...

Under four weeks out, Chuck Todd argues this has been the strangest campaign season he can remember — not because Democrats are overperforming, but because of how Republicans are behaving. Red-state Democrats have successfully separated themselves from the national brand and are no longer disqualified simply for being Democrats. Meanwhile almost no Republicans have sought distance from an unpopular president, and Chuck argues...

Under four weeks out, Chuck Todd argues this has been the strangest campaign season he can remember — not because Democrats are overperforming, but because of how Republicans are behaving. Red-state Democrats have successfully separated themselves from the national brand and are no longer disqualified simply for being Democrats. Meanwhile almost no Republicans have sought distance from an unpopular president, and Chuck argues...

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Marcia Chatelain joins the Chuck ToddCast to discuss How Bright the Path Grows, out October 13th, which tells the story of the Black women who built the 1963 March on Washington and were then written out of it. There's abundant footage of the men who spoke that day; there's no class photo of the women who organized it. Chatelain's central figure is Anna Hedgeman, the march coordinator who noticed no...

Chuck Todd and J.A. Adande trace Green Bay from the Ice Bowl and first Super Bowls through the post-Lombardi struggles and the franchise’s eventual rebirth with Brett Favre, Reggie White and Aaron Rodgers. 

The Green Bay Packers became an NFL dynasty under Vince Lombardi. But what happened when the man who built it left? It’s the story of how the Packers built a dynasty that endured across generations.

See omny...

Twenty-eight days out, Chuck Todd and Chris Cillizza stress-test their own assumptions: if everything points one direction, what could still be wrong? They work through all three counterfactuals — the Republican money advantage, a polling miss, and the fact that it's October 6th and not November 2nd — and find the money argument weakest, since the GOP has owned the airwaves for six weeks with no discernible movement. Th...

Jennifer Palmieri — former Obama and Clinton communications director and host of Crooked Media's Long Play, the documentary series traveling six Southern states — joins the Chuck ToddCast to argue the South is now the epicenter of American politics and Democrats have spent years writing it off. One-party rule has bred civic disengagement, she says, and the region gets treated as a monolith when it's anything but. Her sh...