I’ve spent a long time in rooms where people talk about political race ratings like they’re handed down from on high — toss-up, lean R, safe D — as if there’s a formula somewhere spitting out certainty. Carrie Dann told me this week that she believed that too, once, from the outside.
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 The Cook Political Report. When she got there, she admitted something I loved: she pictured the ratings coming down like “stone tablets from Amy Walter 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.
