SmotusCast

I hope you’ll check out this conversation I had with Karen Middleton about the state of abortion access and reproductive freedom in the wake of the 2022 Dobbs decision. Middleton is the president of Cobalt , a Colorado organization that seeks to protect and advance abortion rights. She’s also a former Colorado state legislator. One of the more fascinating things to me was that the annual number of...

This was a treat. I teamed up yesterday with ian silverii and Jason Bane at the Get More Smarter podcast (the top Democratic-leaning politics podcast in Colorado?) to discuss Tuesday’s primaries. You can watch/listen here, or tune into their podcast, but I want to describe a bit of what we learned here and offer some takeaways on what was a primary election with national consequences. [Ed. note: I...

Historian Alexis Coe of the wonderful Study Marry Kill newsletter was kind enough to interview me about my new book, The Elephants in the Room . We had some video issues, but the audio came through great so I’m posting it here. (You can also listen in podcast form .) Among the things we discuss: * All the ways a 2024 Trump nomination did not seem inevitable in early 2023, even though it seems very...

Yesterday, I was delighted to speak with Colleen Shogan , the former Archivist of the United States and current head of the In Pursuit project at More Perfect . If you didn’t get to listen, I hope you’ll watch above. Among the topics we discussed: the @smotus report is a reader-supported publication. To support this work, please become a paid subscriber. * What is the cause of Americans’ declining...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit smotus.substack.com I’ve been writing and giving a number of talks lately on the modern Republican Party — how it got to where it is today and how it operates in the Age of Donald Trump. A question I often get from people is, What comes next? What does the next presidential contest look like when Donald Trump isn’t a part of it? Where d...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit smotus.substack.com Thanks to Brian Beutler of Off Message for joining me on Thursday for a really rich discussion about some key issues plaguing US politics today. Some things we spoke about: * Left conspiracy theories about Trump assassination attempts: As Brian has written previously , Trump in many ways brings conspiracy theories up...

I was delighted to join G. Elliott Morris for a live video chat this week. Morris runs the Strength In Numbers newsletter, an incredibly valuable resource for generating, reporting, and analyzing the latest polling trends in US politics. We had a wide ranging conversation, covering such topics as: * What political scientists have gotten wrong (the 2016 nomination) and right (his threat to democrac...

I had a chat yesterday with Colorado Democratic political consultant ian silverii . He’s the founder of The Bighorn Company , and he’s worked in the Colorado House of Representatives and directed ProgressNow Colorado. He also occasionally teaches at the University of Denver and co-hosts the excellent Get More Smarter podcast . We discussed how Democrats are interpreting the 2025 elections, what ki...

I was honored to be joined by Denver 9News anchor Kyle Clark for a lunchtime chat on Tuesday, in which we discussed modern political journalism. We got into all sorts of subjects — the challenges facing local media and why it’s still so important, how journalists deal with increasing threats to their safety, what media bias actually looks like, and the consolidation of media, even in places like D...

If you didn’t get a chance to watch my Substack Live video interview with Alan Greenblatt , who recently left his position as editor of Governing , you can watch it above. We discuss various institutions — media organizations, universities, large corporations, and more — that have changed their policies and, arguably, their values to accommodate threats by the Trump administration. Alan talks abou...

If you missed our History Lunch Live session yesterday, here’s the video of presidential historian Alexis Coe interviewing me on the Study Marry Kill site. (You should definitely subscribe to that.) Tusk is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber. We cover a lot of ground, including conspiracy theories, Marjorie Taylor Greene’s...

I was fortunate to run into former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson multiple times during my recent trip to the Iowa caucuses . I give him a lot of credit for being incredibly congenial (and chatting with several of my student) and for seeing through a presidential nomination contest that was clearly not going his way. Tusk is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my wor...

The beginning of March will see more than a dozen Republican primaries and caucuses, through which Donald Trump could effectively secure the presidential nomination. It may also see the opening of the first of four criminal cases against the former president. Should the criminal justice system be working more quickly in this environment — both because a criminal conviction or acquittal would be im...

I’m planning to do several podcast episodes in the run-up to the caucuses and primaries that start next month. The first one is a conversation that Julia Azari and I recently had in which we discuss McKay Coppins’ book Romney: A Reckoning . We discuss a lot in there, including what Romney’s career tells us about the Republican Party over the past decade, what authenticity is, how anti-Trumpers tri...

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