He and Jeff Shockey had worked together on the Appropriations Committee — Jeff as staff director, John as the guy complaining it was time for something new. Jeff’s answer was simple: why don’t we do our own thing? They mapped it out over drinks, shook on it and walked into a PNC branch in Chevy Chase the next morning to open an account with about ten dollars. They paid a college kid to draw six logos. Their wives picked the winner.

Then came the hard part.

“That first year, I went nine months without a paycheck. That’s a little scary.”

John told Brody and me he’d saved ten mortgage payments before they started. He was down to his second-to-last when the first real check arrived — $6,000. He called it the happiest they’ve ever been, and I believed him.

Fifteen years later, S-3 is one of the firms Washington calls when an issue gets complicated. Makes sense. Complicated is where John learned the trade. Nearly a decade on Appropriations means years inside the least legible process in town — the markups, the conference committees, the senators across the table negotiating bills in real time. Knowing how it worked was never the job. Explaining it to the people who didn’t was.

That skill matters more now than it did in 2011. Brody put it to him plainly: the Republican Party is turning on corporate America. How does a lobbyist work with that?

“You have to have a message that is deliverable to Main Street.”

S-3 now represents three unions. For a firm built by two Republican appropriators, that isn’t a detour. It’s the same job with a new audience — and John thinks the party’s focus on working people is a good thing.

What stayed with me most wasn’t the strategy, though. In fifteen years, exactly one person has left S-3 for another firm. A year later he wanted back.

“It’s not about bodies and policy skill sets. It’s about people and individuals and reputations and families.”

Washington likes to measure influence in access and headcount. John made the opposite bet — hire good people no matter which way the political winds blow, keep them and let the reputation compound.

Ten bucks, a handshake and a logo the wives picked. Fifteen years in, he’s still running the same play.

Takeaway line: In a Washington that keeps changing its language, the translators are the ones who last.

That’s where her new book opens. Katie ran Facebook’s global elections work for a decade, through 2016, Cambridge Analytica and the congressional hearings that followed. This week she came back to The Friday Reporter for a second conversation, this time about Disrupting Politics: A Front Row Seat to the Collision of Technology and Democracy, out October 6.

She didn’t hedge on why she wrote it. People know the Zuckerberg and Sandberg version. Almost nobody knows what the people in the trenches lived through day to day. She wanted that on the record, in her words.

Katie and I came up the same way. Campaigns first, an analog world, then a digital one. I was at the RNC when she was, and we all wanted the same thing: a president talking directly to voters online. For fifteen years that was the goal. Then it felt like everything changed overnight.

Washington and Silicon Valley are still two bubbles that bump into each other now and then. These days she’s in DC explaining what a prompt is, the same way she once explained a news feed. Anyone who watched Mark Zuckerberg tell a senator “we sell ads” remembers what that gap costs.

You’d expect someone who lived through that backlash to come out of it cynical about AI. Katie didn’t. Her mantra is panic responsibly: weigh what’s in front of you, make the best call you can and be willing to pivot. Congress probably won’t move before 2029. The states already are. And election officials, from the Secretaries of State to Democracy Works, are sitting down with AI companies right now on how chatbots answer where, when and how to vote. She wishes it had started six months ago. It started.

Every time I get breathless about technology, I hear Katie in my head.

She ended on something bigger than tech companies or Congress. We choose our platforms. We choose what we read and what we share. That sends a signal on its own.

Fifty years from now historians will write about this stretch. Katie made sure her story is in the pile. The rest of us are writing ours every time we hit share.

Preorder Disrupting Politics here: [LINK]

Notable Quotes

• “I didn’t want anyone else telling me my story.”

• “The best thing you can do is weigh the options in front of you right now. Make the best decision you can, and then be willing to pivot based upon what you learn from that.”

• “We can control what content we are consuming, and we can think about what content we are sharing.”

Takeaway

The problem isn’t panic. It’s freezing up. Twenty-five years at the collision of tech and politics taught Katie Harbath to make the call, stay ready to change it and never forget the citizen has a say too.

Watch here —

Her aunt was Anne Northup of Kentucky — a straight shooter, Bradbury told Brody and me this week, the kind of member who worked harder for her district than anyone gave her credit for. Bradbury studied political science, did the internships, landed in the Bush administration, and eventually became a floor aide. Then the first female floor director for a Speaker of the House. Then, without setting out to, the person running an all-female floor staff.

“We kind of looked around one day and said, well, this is crazy. I just built the first all-female floor staff in any leadership office.”

That was not the headline she was chasing. It rarely is, for her. Bradbury spent years managing the suspension calendar — the unglamorous bills that pass by a two-thirds vote and never make the news, because bipartisan and boring go together in this town. She still thinks about Washington that way: an iceberg, mostly submerged, doing more than anyone watching from above gives it credit for.

Now she runs the American Exploration and Production Council, the trade group for the independent producers responsible for most of America’s oil and natural gas, and the argument she’s making sounds almost nothing like what you’d expect from an industry with a friendly White House.

“There’s no pause button.”

Drill a well and most of its output comes in year one. Let regulation swing every time the White House changes hands, and you’re not protecting the industry from a hostile administration — you’re making it impossible to plan for any administration.

“Whoever can win the energy race is going to win the future.”

She means that as a warning as much as a boast: the alternative isn’t less American energy, it’s Russia and Iran filling the gap.

It would be easy to write that off as an industry talking its own book. Bradbury doesn’t sound like she’s talking a book. She sounds like someone who spent fifteen years learning that the real work in this town is the kind nobody covers — steady, structural, done in both directions across the aisle, one suspension-calendar vote at a time.

She built a career on things that don’t pause. Now she’s arguing her industry can’t either.

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If you listened to my first conversation with Senator Shelly Moore Capito and Emily Goodin, you already know this game is about a lot more than what happens on the field.

For this second episode, I’m joined by Atalie Ebersole and Mary Ajango, who bring another perspective on the game, the Young Survival Coalition and the community that has grown around this really remarkable Washington tradition.

We talk about why this night matters, what the Young Survival Coalition means to the women it serves and why showing up — literally — can make a difference.

The game is next Wednesday, September 23, at Audi Field.

So if you haven’t gotten your tickets yet, this is your nudge. Come watch Congress take on the Washington press corps and support a cause that deserves the attention.

Tickets are available at congwomensoftball.org.

And with that, here’s Part Two.

This is a special two-fer edition of The Friday Reporter because sometimes one conversation just isn’t enough.

This week, I talked with four women who know the Congressional Women’s Softball Game from very different angles — Senator Shelly Moore Capito (R-WV) and Emily Goodin (New York Post), team captains for the two teams and then Atalie Ebersole, President of the Congressional Softball Game and Mary Ajango, Young Survival Coalition.

And if you know anything about this game, you know it’s about a lot more than softball.

For 18 years, women Members of Congress have taken on the women of the Washington press corps (Bad News Babes) in a bipartisan game that has become one of Capitol Hill’s great traditions.

But the reason this game exists — and the reason it keeps going — is the Young Survival Coalition, which supports young adults diagnosed with breast cancer.

Since the game began in 2009, it has raised more than $4.3 million for YSC.

And that’s what really struck me in these conversations: the game is fun, it’s competitive, there’s plenty of trash talk — but underneath all of that is something pretty powerful. Women who spend their days on opposite sides of politics come together around a cause that has nothing to do with party.

The 18th annual game is next Wednesday, September 23, at Audi Field here in Washington.

So if you’re looking for something to do next Wednesday night, go watch some women in Congress take on the press corps — and support a really important cause while you’re at it.

Tickets are on sale now at congwomensoftball.org

Tune in and play ball!

That’s the house Will grew up arguing in. Not the Massachusetts summers with his grandfather. The other one, on a small farm in Ohio, where his parents were the crunchy, MAHA-before-it-was-a-hashtag kind of household, debating politics over dinner in a way that let nobody off easy.

“I had to know why I believed what I believed,” he told Brody and me this week. “I couldn’t just posit something. I had to be able to back it up.”

He’s President and CEO of the American Investment Council now, which means he spends his days defending a multi-trillion-dollar industry that most of Washington still doesn’t understand and, more often than not, doesn’t want to. Private equity is easy to be against. It’s the villain in a hundred campaign ads, the shorthand for everything wrong with modern capitalism, and Will’s job is to walk into rooms full of people who’ve already made up their minds and explain it anyway.

That’s not a new skill for him. That’s the dinner table.

What struck me, listening back, is how directly one connects to the other. He didn’t learn to argue policy on the Hill, though he spent fifteen years there, seven as Kevin McCarthy’s top policy staffer, sitting in on the four-corners negotiations with Pelosi and Schumer and McConnell. He learned it first at home, against people who loved him and disagreed with him anyway.

“The vast majority of private equity firms don’t have a government relations person. They don’t have a communications point person. They really are putting the private in private equity.”

That’s the gap he’s trying to close. Not with a bigger ad budget. With stories — a California company where longtime employees walked away with 30 months’ salary when it sold, a 70-year-old medical device maker that got its innovation back and an ice cream truck that turned into a hundred stores.

“34 million Americans in public pensions rely on private equity to secure their retirement.”

That’s the number that should reframe the argument, if anyone’s still listening by the time it gets said. It’s not a hedge fund story. It’s somebody’s mother, teaching third grade, counting on a pension that a private equity deal helped fund.

Will Dunham spent his childhood learning that being right and being understood are two different jobs. He’s still doing both.

Tune in Tuesday on YouTube to see the whole episode.

That morning it was Drumthwacket. I parked and walked into the command center to find the troopers on detail that day, the way I did most mornings. One of them was racing out as I came in — his father was in one of the towers. A plane had hit, that much everyone knew. That early we thought it was small, contained, and an accident.

I walked through the side door into Drumthwacket and saw the televisions on in the troopers’ offices, and that was the moment I knew. This is not what I had in mind for today.

The Governor himself was further inside, in the parlor, with a group of Holocaust survivors the state was hosting for breakfast, deeply engaged in a room you don’t want to interrupt. But reports were coming in that the National Mall was on fire, that this wasn’t contained to one place and we had to get to State Police headquarters.

What I remember most about those first hours isn’t a fact. It’s the fear — deep and gut-level. I was twenty-six years old, and for most of that day I wouldn’t let Rae Hutton, the Governor’s press secretary, out of my sight. I needed an adult in the room, even though by then I was supposed to be one.

The reporters wanted the same thing from us. What do you know? What can you tell us? It sounded like a question about facts, but really it was a search for reassurance, for some sense that someone, somewhere, had an answer. That day was the first time in my life I understood that the adults did not always have the answers.

There was no way to check on the people I loved either. My boyfriend at the time — now my husband — and my sister were both in Washington. None of the calls were going through. The troopers and I had two-way pagers, a little texting, nothing more. No BlackBerrys, no iPhones. You sat and watched broadcast news, and that was the whole of what you knew, professionally and personally, at once.

I had friends at the Port Authority. Several were running late that morning and never made it in. I think about that luck often. Others weren’t as fortunate — New Jersey lost more than seven hundred people that day. I still remind people of this: we were closer to Manhattan than Albany was. We were on the ground before the Governor of New York even arrived. One woman on the Governor’s staff lost her brother in the towers. I went with the Governor and the troopers to his funeral. I have never once heard bagpipes since without feeling that day in my bones.

Later that day, before any of the funerals, the Governor prepared to board a Black Hawk for Liberty State Park. He turned to me first.

“Not today, Lisa. I do not know what we will see. Today, I would like you to stay here and stay safe.”

He was the one flying toward it. I was the one told to wait. Twenty-five years later, I’m still not sure which of us had the harder job.

Debbie Baker went with him — the same trooper who’d first told him a plane had hit. When she came back, she had a blank look on her face. I asked her what she saw.

“There was nobody there,” she said.

That night I drove myself home, alone on roads that should have had other cars on them and didn’t. I have never been more frightened in my life. I got home, turned the television on, and didn’t turn it off. I don’t think I slept.

The next day, we went into the city by boat — the Holland Tunnel was closed, so boat was the only way in. What I saw at the site looked like a war zone, except it wasn’t a war, and everyone there knew it. Hundreds of people moving in near silence, still searching for anyone who might be alive.

I sat in the biggest rooms and the saddest ones after that — meetings with Mayor Giuliani and Governor Pataki, watching men try to make decisions about a catastrophe no one had a playbook for. I remember Giuliani pushing to get government buildings back open — something close to we need to show them they can’t win — and someone telling him, gently, that the work wasn’t done. Not cleanup. Preservation. It was still a recovery site.

I watched medical students give their time to identification work with no clean edges to it. I walked past telephone poles covered in photographs — faces, names, phone numbers, taped up by people who hadn’t stopped looking yet. There was a smell in the air for weeks I have never been able to describe to anyone who wasn’t there. I will never forget any of it — the rooms, the poles, the smell, the quiet next to the loudest grief I’ve ever been near.

I can’t believe it’s been twenty-five years. Those memories are seared into me in a way almost nothing else from my life is.

That day is the reason I moved to Washington. I wanted to be part of whatever the solution turned out to be — to protect this country, the people I loved, the children I hadn’t had yet and the children they’d go on to have. That’s the call underneath everything I’ve done since.

That day didn’t just define me. It defined a nation.

I asked the Governor this week what he remembers most, twenty-five years on. Not the chaos. Not the decisions. The people who ran toward it. “Even people who weren’t working that day, who went up into those towers to help,” he told me, “and who perished because they were going up while everyone else was coming down.” Tomorrow, like most every year, he’ll be at Ground Zero for the service, standing in the quiet while they read the names.

Twenty-five years ago, he told me to stay behind. Tomorrow, he goes back.

Private equity firms have been circling Washington lobbying shops for years, offering cash for growth and an exit for founders. CGCN Group, the Republican firm Catanzaro co-founded, keeps turning them down.

“We don’t want them to be our bosses. We don’t want people telling us how to run our business.”

In this week’s episode, Catanzaro talks independence like a business decision.

His firm considered going bipartisan once, right after a brutal 2020 election, when plenty of Republican shops were quietly building out Democratic practices as insurance. CGCN said no to that, too.

“We’ve cornered the market on the best Republican information analysis in Washington because of that trust. If we go bipartisan, we lose it.”

He was pleased to report that CGCN grew during the Biden years. Not despite being an all-Republican shop, but because of it. Clients needed help fighting regulations they hated and CGCN had built the muscle to do exactly that.

“We positioned the firm to be immune to what we once thought were adverse political cycles. For us, it doesn’t matter.”

Most of Washington optimizes for the next election, not the next decade. Hedge the bet, diversify the client list, take the money when it’s offered because who knows what happens eighteen months from now.

That instinct makes sense, but it’s a different bet than the one Catanzaro made.

He learned to make it from Bob Novak — the columnist he worked for as a young reporter, decades before any of this. Novak’s rule was sit down, shut up and listen.

“No one cares what you think or what you say,” Catanzaro remembers him saying.

Everyone in this town wants to be the smartest person in the room. Novak taught a 20-something that the room doesn’t need him to be smart. It needs him to be paying attention.

I think that’s the thread running through all of this. The private equity offers. The decision to stay Republican. The way the firm grew during the Biden years.

Catanzaro built a firm that doesn’t need to know what happens next, it just needs to pay attention.

The Deciders with Mike Catanzaro hits YouTube tomorrow morning. https://www.youtube.com/@DecidersShow

I told him going in I wouldn’t hold him to a prediction. He didn’t need the disclaimer. “The numbers have gone from very bad to extremely bad for President Trump and Republicans,” he told me, then walked me through exactly why that still isn’t the same thing as a sure thing.

Independents have Trump’s favorability sitting in the mid-20s. That’s a wave-election signal, by his own description. And yet Republicans still have the map. Democrats need every purple Senate seat plus two states Trump carried by double digits in 2024. Gerrymandering ate most of what should have been an easy House flip. So David gives Democrats 75 to 80 percent in the House and something close to a coin flip in the Senate. Bad numbers. Not a landslide.

What struck me most wasn’t the math. It was what he said drives it. “Everything falls under the bucket of inflation, or most everything,” he told me — healthcare premiums, gas and fertilizer prices after the Strait of Hormuz closed, tariffs squeezing farmers who voted for this. He doesn’t think those voters defect to the other side. He thinks they just stay home. James Carville figured that one out in 1992. Some things do not age.

He also let me in on something that should worry anyone who reads a poll and calls it a fact: pollsters are now modeling the views of the country off the roughly 1 percent of people who bother to pick up and answer. The best data, he said, rarely even makes it out publicly. Everyone else is reading a narrower picture than they think they are.

We closed on Iowa, which he called the most important state of 2026 — a Senate race, a governor’s race and a state more exposed to foreign trade than nearly any other in the country, all on one ballot.

Five conversations. Five people who do this work with more precision, more humility and more generosity than I expected going in. To , , , , Jessica Taylor and David Wasserman: thank you for trusting this show with your time. It was a genuinely great month.

Three moments from the conversation, below.

Key Quotes

“The numbers have gone from very bad to extremely bad for President Trump and Republicans.” — David Wasserman

“Everything falls under the bucket of inflation, or most everything.” — David Wasserman

“We’re relying in some cases on the 1% or less of people who are agreeing to take the survey to model the attitudes of the other 99%.” — David Wasserman

Takeaway

The environment is bad enough for Republicans to look historic, and structurally advantaged enough that it might not be. Whoever tells you they already know how November ends is skipping the second half of that sentence.

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He wasn’t talking about golf. He was talking about data centers — specifically, how much water they use compared to a golf course, and how almost nobody arguing about them online has actually checked. VandeHei built Politico. Then he built Axios. He talks to more AI executives in a month than most senators do in a term. So when Brody Mullins and I sat down with him on The Deciders this week, I expected him to want to talk about the technology. He wanted to talk about the backlash.

“A data center’s become a stand-in for all of artificial intelligence,” he told us. “You really think the average person has sat there and studied whether or not it uses more water than a golf course or not? They just hear it and they have a reflexive reaction to it.”

A week earlier, on The Friday Reporter, Jessica Taylor described almost the same thing from the opposite vantage point. Taylor is the U.S. Senate and Governors Editor at , and she talks to more campaigns, in more states, than almost anyone in nonpartisan political analysis. She wasn’t theorizing. She was reporting what she’s actually hearing — unprompted, from voters and candidates in Ohio, Wisconsin and Kansas, where data centers have become a live, organic issue nobody scripted for them.

It’s a fair critique that Washington still treats AI policy as a debate about chips, compute and federal regulation. That was a defensible read in January. I don’t think it is true anymore.

Not a Silicon Valley problem. A Main Street one. A data center is the one piece of the AI economy most people will ever see with their own eyes — the humming building off the highway, the spiked electric bill, the water table nobody used to think about. That makes it the battleground, whether the industry planned for one or not.

VandeHei thinks it becomes a platform: “I think there’s a not insignificant chance that one of the parties — and I think it’d be the Democrats — will call for like literally shutting it down.”

Taylor isn’t waiting to find out if he’s right. She’s already watching it show up on the ground, ahead of anyone’s platform catching up to it.

Two guests. Two shows. One week apart. Neither one used the phrase “sleeper issue.” They didn’t need to.

Keep an eye on Ohio, Wisconsin and Kansas next year. Not because of who wins. Because of what the losing side decides to blame.

Pull Quotes

“A data center’s become a stand-in for all of artificial intelligence. You really think the average person has sat there and studied whether or not it uses more water than a golf course or not? They just hear it and they have a reflexive reaction to it.” — Jim VandeHei, Axios

“I think there’s a not insignificant chance that one of the parties — and I think it’d be the Democrats — will call for like literally shutting it down.” — Jim VandeHei, Axios

“An all-powerful technology with an all-powerful oligarch cannot coexist with people who have deep envy and feel like they’re getting screwed by the system. And that’s where we’re at right now.” — Jim VandeHei, Axios

Takeaway

Washington is still debating AI policy in the abstract — chips, compute, regulation. Voters are already fighting about it in the concrete: the data center down the road. That gap is the sleeper issue of the 2026 midterms.

CTA

Full conversation with Jim VandeHei on The Deciders, and with Jessica Taylor on The Friday Reporter.

Jessica Taylor talks to more candidates, in more states, than almost anyone else in Washington — and this week, in the fourth stop of my month with the team at the , I finally got to ask her what she’s hearing that the rest of us aren’t.

Her answer surprised me: data centers. Not tariffs, not immigration — data centers. She’s hearing organic, unscripted anger about them from candidates in Ohio’s Senate race and Wisconsin’s and Kansas’s governor’s races, all on their own, unprompted. She says the industry is losing the PR fight badly enough that the phrase she hears everywhere — from teenagers to voters at campaign stops — is simply: AI will take my job.

Then there’s Rob Sand. He’s the only Democrat holding statewide office in Iowa, and Jessica’s one of the few analysts who’s sat down with him more than once this cycle. He holds county meetings across the state and opens each one by singing “God Bless America” and “America the Beautiful,” then says a prayer. His pitch isn’t redder or bluer, he says — it’s “better and truer.” Jessica’s read: Republicans don’t feel great about where this race is headed.

What stuck with me most, though, wasn’t a single race — it was her theory of the moment we’re in. Neither Barack Obama nor Donald Trump, she told me, built a party that outlasts them. Both coalitions showed up when their namesake was on the ballot and stayed home when he wasn’t. So is American politics just going to keep getting more person-centric, more cult-of-personality, because that’s what actually motivates people to vote? Or does someone eventually build something that lasts past themselves? She doesn’t know. Neither do I. But it’s the right question heading into 2028.

She also pushed back, hard, on the idea that a Democratic wave is coming — redistricting has left too few competitive seats for a 2018-style blowout, she says, and if Democrats do flip the Senate, it’ll be centrists like Roy Cooper and Sherrod Brown who get them there, not the loudest voices in the primary.

And she closed with the myth she most wants people to retire - that social media buzz translates into actual votes. You can raise money online. You can go viral. “But the fundamentals are still the fundamentals.”

Three moments from our conversation, below.

Pull Quotes

“I hear all the time from not only the teenagers that live in my home, but like everywhere I go, the words, AI will take my job.” — Jessica Taylor

“He opens by, you know, singing God Bless America and America the Beautiful and with a prayer... not redder or bluer, but better and truer.” — Jessica Taylor, on Rob Sand

“I think that social media buzz is going to translate to votes [is the myth]... the fundamentals are still the fundamentals, I think.” — Jessica Taylor

Takeaway

The 2026 map isn’t being reshaped by a wave in either direction — it’s being reshaped by data-center backlash, candidates who can cross party lines in person, and a growing sense that no single leader can hand their coalition off to the next one.

Noah Theran, Executive Vice President and Head of Global External Affairs for the Managed Funds Association, told Brody Mullins and I on The Deciders that the loop is broken, and most organizations haven’t caught up. The next episode of The Deciders airs Tuesday, August 25.

“The pitch is dead. The pitch is dead. If you are operating in a transactional way with reporters, you’re unlikely to be successful.”

The math has changed, Theran said. The news cycle no longer runs on a reporter’s schedule — it runs on the regulator’s. When a final rule drops, the only story that gets written is the one filed in the minutes right after, not the one filed after a week of careful reflection.

“The only story that’s going to be written is within 15 minutes of that final rule coming out. ... That’s not easy, and it takes a lot of trust within the team. But when you get it right, the outcome for the organization can be immense.”

Theran’s answer isn’t to abandon earned media — it’s to stop treating it as the whole job. He runs his team around three legs of one stool: earned, owned and paid, moving together, with nobody boxed into a single lane. Paid media, in particular, he’s stopped thinking of as a numbers game and started treating as an engineering problem.

“The old school Mad Men adage was 50% of your advertising is wasted, you just don’t know what 50. And I am trying to reduce that 50 to like 10.”

That shows up in where MFA spends: connected TV routed through LinkedIn’s targeting, ads built to reach a specific COO or legislative director rather than a general D.C. audience, and — pointedly — skepticism of the newsletter sponsorships and low-ROI events that used to be comms table stakes.

It’s a case for a communications function that looks less like a press shop and more like a campaign — one where legal, government affairs and comms move on the same clock, because increasingly, they have to.

TAKEAWAY

The old model treated earned, owned and paid media as separate jobs on separate timelines. Theran’s version treats them as one campaign, running on the regulator’s clock, not the reporter’s — and organizations that haven’t made that shift are the ones still writing pitches nobody answers.

This is the third stop in my month with the team at , after conversations with House editor and managing editor . But this one is different. Amy is the person who inherited Charlie Cook’s operation and has spent her career protecting the trust he built. Kathryn is the person who runs the business behind it — the partnerships, the access, the infrastructure that lets an operation of nine people reach a country of millions.

What struck me most wasn’t the political analysis, though there was plenty of that. It was how deliberately both of them talked about staying nonpartisan. Amy told me it isn’t a talent, it’s a discipline — something she has to practice, especially when a source says something that gets her “a little hot under the collar.” Kathryn’s read on the moment we’re in was even sharper. She said the thing she hears most isn’t that people don’t trust anyone anymore. It’s that they’ve stopped listening entirely. That’s a different problem.

And then there was the thing that actually explains why the Cook Political Report works: they’ve never sold a single ad. When you subscribe, you’re paying for a clean, straightforward read with no agenda attached — no clutter, no pop-ups, no sponsor with a thumb on the scale. That business model isn’t incidental to the trust. It is the trust.

We closed with a lightning round. Amy’s answer stuck with me: the most undercovered story in politics right now isn’t this November, it’s 2027 — the largest freshman class in the House in at least 30 years, arriving with two competing mandates, to fight Trump or to support him, headed straight into a leadership structure that’s barely settled in itself.

Charlie Cook built something extraordinary. Watching Amy and Kathryn talk about what it takes to keep it that way, on purpose, every single day, made it clear this isn’t inherited good fortune. It’s work. I respect the hell out of what this team does.

Three moments from the conversation, below.

Key Quotes

“The most important thing you can have anywhere, but especially in this town, is your credibility and your reputation. And it takes a long time to build it up and it doesn’t take a very long time to lose it.” — Amy Walter

“The first thing I hear most often isn’t even, I don’t trust anyone anymore. It’s, I stop listening.” — Kathryn Hamm

“When you come to the Cook Political Report, you’re paying a subscription and that means you get a clean experience.” — Amy Walter

Takeaway

The Cook Political Report’s credibility isn’t an accident of longevity — it’s a daily discipline, reinforced by a business model with no ads and no agenda to protect.

The full conversation with Amy Walter and Kathryn Hamm of the Cook Political Report is live on YouTube now. Third stop in our month with the team behind the gold standard.

Thornell spent two decades near the top of Democratic politics — advising House leadership through the ACA and Dodd-Frank, then helping take Wes Moore from 2% in the polls to the Maryland governorship. He joined Brody Mullins and Lisa to make the case that Democrats need to move with more urgency, not less, and to break down the authenticity playbook behind two of the country’s most trusted — and most politically opposite — brands.

Drops Tuesday. [SUBSCRIBE LINK]

Carrie spent almost eighteen years in NBC News’ Washington bureau — an embedded campaign reporter, an editor, eventually running the network’s Capitol Hill team — before she became Managing Editor of the . When she got there, she admitted something I loved: she pictured the ratings coming down like “stone tablets from on high.” Then she watched how they’re actually made, and the reverence gave way to something more interesting — nine people, meeting candidates, tracking fundraising, arguing over how much weight to give a single news cycle. Part quantitative, part qualitative, as she put it. Neither art nor science. In between.

What stuck with me most, though, wasn’t the process — it was what she said about failure. In 2012, her editors gave her what they called the best assignment on the beat: cover the man everyone assumed would be the Republican nominee. He wasn’t. Watching that campaign collapse in real time, she told me, taught her more than any winning campaign ever has. There’s something in that for anyone who covers, predicts, or works in politics for a living — the stories that don’t pan out are usually where the real education happens.

And then there was the number that stayed with me after we talked: new Gallup data found that roughly half of Americans aren’t confident their own ballot will be counted correctly. Carrie called it “a really alarming stat,” and she’s right that it isn’t getting nearly the urgency it deserves — not from candidates, not from officials, not from those of us in the media.

This is the second stop in our month-long takeover with the Cook Political Report, and Carrie’s conversation left me thinking differently about how much human judgment sits underneath every rating I’ve ever casually cited. Three moments that stayed with me, below.

Notable Quotes

“I envisioned these stone tablets coming down from Amy Walter on high of like, this is how we pronounce how these races are going to turn out.” — Carrie Dann

“Campaigns that are unsuccessful teach you a lot more, I think, as a reporter, than campaigns that are successful.” — Carrie Dann

“Voters and candidates are human people… they are driven by their lived experience… which is why every election is about the economy.” — Carrie Dann

Takeaway

The ratings everyone treats as certainty are made by people who know exactly how much could go wrong — and it’s the losing campaigns, not the winning ones, that teach them the most.

The full conversation with Carrie Dann — on stone tablets, failed frontrunners, and the number that should worry all of us — is live on YouTube now. Second stop in our month with the Cook Political Report.

Bonjean and Mollineau joined Brody Mullins and I to talk about the coffee meeting that turned into a firm, why they’ve turned down every private equity offer since, what “bipartisan” actually means for a Fortune 100 client under pressure, and the very different paths — one a Republican, one a Democrat — that led them both to the same table.

Drops Tuesday. [SUBSCRIBE LINK]

This week I sat down with Erin Covey, who leads House race coverage for , to kick off a month of conversations with their team. She told me something that stopped me: the team behind every rating you’ve ever cited is nine people. Nine people, tracking roughly 40 competitive House races every single week, plus the Senate, the governors, and the presidency every four years.

What struck me most was how much of the job is restraint. It would be easier, in some ways, to call every close race a toss-up and let the outcome sort itself out. Erin pushed back on that instinct directly — the whole point of the exercise is to make a call, even when the call might be wrong.

She also walked me through Texas’s 23rd, a seat that should be safely Republican and isn’t anymore — not because of redistricting or national trends, but because of exactly who’s on the ballot. It’s a reminder that all the modeling in the world still runs into the fact that candidates are people, and people are unpredictable.

And I loved her answer when I asked whether growing up outside Washington — in a military family, across the South and overseas — changes how she reads a district. Her answer, below, is the whole thesis of good political journalism.

Notable Quotes from Today’s Episode

“It’s our team, which is smaller than a lot of people expect. Currently, nine members on our team.” — Erin Covey

“If we put everything in toss-up, then we wouldn’t really be making any predictions at all, right?” — Erin Covey

“There’s something inherently important about having lived outside the Beltway to understand that you can’t apply the same rules or the same filter for each and every district because they all are so inherently different.” — Erin Covey

My Takeaway

Behind every House rating you read this fall is a small team making deliberate, sometimes uncomfortable calls — and the districts that surprise us usually do so because of the person on the ballot, not the map underneath them.

The full conversation — on toss-ups, cash, and the Texas seat nobody expected to be competitive — is live on YouTube now. First of a month of Cook Political Report guests on the show.

Bentz joined Brody Mullins and myself to talk about growing up on the grounds of a California prison, the mentor who taught her to stop talking and start listening, why the MAHA movement has upended the old rules of advocacy, and how a patchwork of 50 state ingredient laws could create chaos for companies and consumers alike.

If you want to understand how the industry behind the products you use 42 times a day is navigating Trump’s Washington, this is the conversation to catch.

Drops Tuesday! Watch then on YouTube — https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKiZb2ku39tMpOUd2GXJ2bQ

French Hill has been reviving that ritual for about a decade now, at his own dinner table instead of the Capitol basement. Two Democrats, two Republicans, dinner at his house, until the arrangement stops being a novelty and starts being a habit. It’s not nostalgia. It’s math.

Brett Guthrie doesn’t set a table for it. His instinct comes from a father who worked a Ford plant in Bowling Green, Kentucky, until it closed, and a family that started an auto parts business rather than start over somewhere new. That’s the sensibility he brought to a bill to protect kids online, written with his Democratic ranking member, that passed the House with real votes from both sides. Guthrie’s staff and Frank Pallone’s staff, mostly young people who happen to also be young parents, found they agreed on something and didn’t need an invitation to admit it.

One chairman built an institution around bipartisanship. The other backed into it and decided not to talk himself out of it. Both will tell you it’s rarer than it should be. Neither seemed interested in making a show of it.

Here’s how each of them put it, in their own words.

Direct Quotes

“My philosophy is that good policy attracts solid legislative support from both parties.” — Rep. French Hill

“I have two Democrats and two Republicans come to my house for dinner... it’s a way to build relationships. And those relationships have been integral to the work I’ve done in the House.” — Rep. French Hill

“It’s okay to knock heads in Washington when you disagree on a policy. But this isn’t something we disagreed on.” — Rep. Brett Guthrie

My Takeaway”

Nobody’s filming Room 128 anymore. But somewhere between a Kentucky auto plant and a Little Rock dinner table, both men insist it’s still there.

Full conversations with Chairman Guthrie and Chairman Hill are on The Deciders — watch on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcasts.

1. Trust Compounds

Amanda Eversole, who runs the Financial Services Forum, made the same point about banking: trust isn’t a talking point, it’s compounding interest — and it’s the foundation every other positioning decision sits on. Deirdre Walsh has covered Capitol Hill for two decades; members don’t spin her anymore, because she’s spent twenty years proving she’s actually listening.

2. Skip the Jargon

Drew Maloney explained a wonky utility rate fight with one image: a full bus costs less per rider than an empty one — that’s what AI data centers actually do to the grid. Chris Pilkerton reframed his entire CFIUS role at Treasury as customer service, not enforcement. Neither needed a briefing book to make the point land — the clearest executives translate, they don’t recite.

3. Lead With the Story, Not the Procedure

Morgan Griffith didn’t move a Medal of Honor bill through Congress by treating it like a bill. Steve Ubl, running the pharmaceutical industry’s biggest trade group, made his sharpest point about gene therapy policy by telling us about his son, not the industry. Positioning that sticks is personal before it’s procedural.

4. Go Where the Decision Actually Gets Made

Linda Moore’s team at TechNet tracks more than 1,000 AI bills across all 50 states, with staff embedded in the state capitals that matter — because “adoption of AI is lagging here in the U.S.” stopped being a Washington-only problem a while ago. Patrick Dorton made the adjacent case: DC’s lobbyists are underpaid for the strategic weight they carry, and it shows in the work. Good positioning follows the decision, not the headline.

5. Read the Room Accurately

Tom Emmer counts votes for a living. His read: some members used to threaten to fly the plane into the building. Now they actually do it — and knowing the difference between a bluff and a real threat is the whole job. Matthew Cutts made the boardroom version of the same point: CEOs who once shrugged off Washington now build political retaliation into their risk models, because it stopped being hypothetical. Positioning without an accurate read of the room is just guessing.

The Common Thread

Six months, a dozen-plus guests, one pattern: the best-positioned executives in this town aren’t the loudest ones. They’re the clearest.

Is Your Executive Positioning Keeping Up?

If any of this sounds like a gap in your own strategy — messaging that’s accurate but isn’t landing, a story that’s true but isn’t resonating — that’s exactly what a Comms Checkup is built to find. Start with the Comms Checkup