The Big Picture with Edwin Eisendrath

Mike Nellis has a ton of political experience, and knows how to deliver a winning message. That’s why he doesn’t confuse Tuesday big victory with sustainable political power. “Democrats are not popular just because we won,” he told me. Across the country terrific candidates earned trust by listening and championing the people in their districts. The party’s job is to catch up to the candidates—not...

Ezra Levin, co-founder of Indivisible, wasn’t interested in taking a victory lap. He wanted to talk about the people who refused to give up. He told me he met people across the country who recognized the autocratic consolidation of power and refused to let it pass. “They said, okay, I guess I got to do this,” he told me. “I guess I got to organize my community.” Ezra described a country in which p...

I began my conversation with Pat Kreitlow by saying something you don’t hear often from a Chicago guy: “Go Brewers!” But the goodwill across the state line wasn’t really about baseball. I wanted to know whether Wisconsin has a chance to make its legislature look more like the people it represents—and whether Democrats are able to hold on to the governor’s office. Pat, the founding editor of Up Nor...

I began our conversation bemoaning all the negative campaign garbage filling our mailboxes and phones. But the real question isn’t how much money they can spend making us miserable. It’s whether cruelty still wins elections—or whether Americans have had enough. Joe’s former Republican colleagues have learned Trump’s lesson: never apologize, never take responsibility, just attack. On the hideous Vi...

Before I asked Michael Roth, president of Wesleyan University, about the attacks on higher education, I wanted to talk about what he’s defending. Roth is a historian and an unusually outspoken defender of higher education. His first argument for a liberal education is practical: nobody knows what the future will require, so students need more than training for the job somebody thinks they’ll have....

G. Elliot Morris, the journalist behind Strength in Numbers and the election-forecasting site 50 Plus One, is a numbers guy. He is smart and works very hard. That has made him THE go to guy for anyone attempting to understand polling data this cycle. But during our recent conversation on Heartland Signal, Morris told me something was happening in Texas. I thought he was going to talk about polling...

The election is underway. People are already voting, and the question before them is pretty simple: Donald Trump and the Republicans hold all the power in Washington. Have they used that power well? As we vote, it isn’t, what did Donald Trump promise. Or whom did he insult. It isn’t a question of policy. It is a question of results. Can you afford the life you want to live? Are you better off? Is...

I’ve been to Alaska. It is stunningly beautiful, impossibly big, and a place most of us in the lower 48 don’t understand very well. We see Republican election victories and think we know the politics. After talking with James Brooks, the Alaska Beacon ’s state reporter, I think we ought to look again. “How I typically explain it is that it’s conservative without being religiously conservative,” Ja...

Mark Jacob and I covered a lot of ground, but the through line was clear: we are living through a constitutional, media, and civic emergency—and too many institutions are still treating it as a series of disconnected incidents rather than the larger crisis it is. We began with Time Magazine’s unusually unvarnished Trump interview. I said no novelist could write dialogue that strange; Mark’s centra...

Elie Mystal is the Justice correspondent at The Nation , an author, and an attorney who focuses on the Supreme Court. He came to our conversation ready to make the case that America’s political and legal problems are deeply connected, and that the Supreme Court sits near the center of both. He successfully made his case. We started with 9-11 and the war in Iraq, partly our combat operations in Ira...

This week Joe Walsh and I agreed that Senate hearing into Jack Smith laid bare what today’s GOP is. We talked about the next few weeks of the midterms, and about what faces the next Congress. Highlights here (yes, courtesy of AI): * 00:00 — Can Democrats win the Senate? * 01:36 — Eric Schmitt’s Jack Smith hearing backfire * 03:26 — Trump’s GOP: Never apologize, always double down * 04:13 — Why Tru...

Kansans seem to have turned from Republican policies, even if they aren’t in the habit of voting from Democrats. I find that curious, so I reached out to Clay Wirestone, an opinion writer at the Kansas Reflector . Clay called it “the fundamental mystery of Kansas politics.” He then explained it by reviewing the unique history of that state. He explained how the meaning of Republicanism changed ove...

This week Joe Walsh and I agreed that the country is beginning to feel the real-world consequences of the Trump administration’s incompetent leadership- our economic pain, his failed war, America’s collapsing international standing. Despite this, Congress opted to go home rather than go to work. We had some fun with that. After all, they thought protecting Pete Hegseth was more important than doin...

Dr. Deb Houry served our country for a decade at the CDC. She was its Chief Medical Officer. Her colleagues described her as brilliant, hardworking, and effective. Her work earned her the AMA’s award for outstanding government service. She resigned a year ago so that she could sound the alarm about what was going on at the CDC and what it means for the public health of Americans. When we talked re...

Ben Collins is CEO of the company that saved and now publishes The Onion, and the guy who took Info Wars from that terrible, cruel, liar Alex Jones. On his watch the Onion has become one of the largest circulation print newspapers in America. As the former CEO of the Chicago Sun Times, I know how impressive that is. We talked about the choices Americans face. Ben said, Once you realize your goal i...

Journalist and political analyst Ahmed Baba joined me on my radio show this week. I suggested we have our conversation on video, and despite dealing with an HVAC issue and a summer heat wave, he graciously agreed, and made it look easy. We began where every political conversation for the last decade begins- with Donald Trump. I wondered whether Americans, finally, come to realize how corrupt the a...

Ami Fields- Meyer is a senior fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School. What that means is that he held important jobs in government and likely will again when administrations change. His work there is like our work here- it’s all about democracy- how to protect and renew it. He recently co-authored with Julia Angwin, a fabulous book called On Courage, How to be a Dissident in an Age of Fear. The book s...

Laura Jedeed gets published by The New Republic, New York Magazine, Rolling Stone and other places that value solid journalism and good writing. You can also find her work at firewalled media. That’s where you will find her fabulous story, The Wet and Wild Freedom Day Catastrophe , where she reports on her Fourth of July on the National Mall. That story, and her report on the UFC match on the Whit...

This year, the Fourth of July holds special meaning because our captured government no longer believes it is self-evident that all are created equal and endowed with rights no one can take away. Yet all across our great nation Americans are celebrating precisely that belief. What’s more, we are celebrating the idea that governments exist to secure these rights even as our own has weaponized the ju...

Several times a year I get the privilege of catching up with John Nichols. John is editor of The Nation . He is also the associate editor of the Cap Times in the important and beautiful state of Wisconsin. He is somehow also the author of books that go right at the essential questions of money and power in America. This week he joined me from the stacks of the Library of Congress where he is doing...

Every Tuesday at noon eastern time Susan J. Demas , the executive editor at Lincoln Square and I talk about the latest news and share our thoughts about the path we are on. Today Susan began by discussing some of the SCOTUS rulings. At one point, after noting that Alito got upset when Justice Sotomayor read her dissent from the bench Susan couldn’t have been clearer: Alito responded from the bench...

Imagine you lingering at dinner, the wine bottle is open and the conversation is turns to American democracy… that’s what where my conversation began with Tom Nichols, the Atlantic staff writer who spent 25 years teaching at US Naval War College. We talked about the loss of a shared sense of who we are as Americans. We mused about whether the draft was a good idea, and what might replace as a way...

Lisa Graves is the founder and executive director of True North Research, author of Without Precedent: How Chief Justice Roberts and His Accomplices Rewrote the Constitution and Dismantled Our Rights, co-host of Legal AF on the Meidas Touch network. As busy as she is, she still finds time to talk with me from time to time about SCOTUS, and about American democracy. A year ago, she and her research...

Adam Klasfeld is the owner and editor in chief of All Rise News. He created it because traditional media wasn’t meeting the moment when it came to covering the judiciary. His work is timely, clear, and vitally important. We spoke this week after another round of dismal rulings from the U.S. Supreme Court. With SCOTUS still sitting on the birthright citizenship case, Adam made the stunning point th...

Margaret is a visiting lecturer at Yale Law School. She served as an assistant U.S. attorney in Connecticut and before that in the JAG Corps for six years as a captain. She writes for Just Security . During this conversation Margaret- who served in Iraq- talked about what it’s like for military personnel to hear elected officials say crazy things. She worries about the impact on our soldiers when...