The Playbook Podcast

POLITICO's Burgess Everett with a mega-scoop this morning: “Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema is changing her party affiliation to independent, delivering a jolt to Democrats’ narrow majority and Washington along with it. “In a 45-minute interview, the first-term senator told POLITICO that she will not caucus with Republicans and suggested that she intends to vote the same way she has for four years in...

The battle to become President Joe Biden's top defender on Capitol Hill is on. With Republicans sharpening their investigative knives for Biden (this week, House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy released a list of more than a dozen lines of inquiry into the administration), the race to succeed outgoing Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) as the top Dem on the House Oversight Committee raging at a fever pitch. ...

Over the past 30 months, Raphael Warnock has won a Senate primary, got the most votes in two general elections and won two runoffs. On Tuesday night, he finally won a full six-year term in the United States Senate.  A lot has been said about how flawed a candidate that Warnock’s opponent, Herschel Walker, was. (A lot.) And so much of the conversation and coverage of Georgia’s election centered on...

Six days after top congressional leaders emerged from the White House suggesting they would work together to pass an omnibus government funding bill before the holidays, Kevin McCarthy went on Fox News last night and sent a very different message. “We’re 28 days away from Republicans having the gavel. We would be stronger in every negotiation. So any Republican that's out there trying to work with...

 In roughly 37 hours, Georgians will cast the final votes of the 2022 midterms, deciding the Senate runoff between incumbent Democrat Raphael Warnock and Republican football legend Herschel Walker. The two campaigns spent the final weekend very differently. Warnock continued his flood-the-zone strategy, with six events across the state, while Walker held just one public event, on Sunday with GOP S...

The 11th Circuit delivered a unanimous opinion shutting down the special master review of the documents that the FBI seized from Mar-a-Lago and dismissing Donald Trump's civil lawsuit over the matter. The opinion was an embarrassing rebuke of U.S. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon, who was widely criticized for indulging what legal scholars across the ideological spectrum described as Trump’s spe...

Since Election Day, the drama in the House has been concentrated on the GOP side, as Kevin McCarthy tries to overcome a MAGA world mutiny to get the gavel, and Democrats smoothly elect three new leaders to succeed Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer and Jim Clyburn. But it turns out things are not all kumbaya in the House Dem caucus.  — Amid some Democrats’ discontentment about Clyburn’s insistence on stayi...

In 1992, two days into a crippling railroad strike, then-Sen. Joe Biden came to the Senate floor and decried the lopsided nature of federal labor laws dealing with the rail industry — laws, he argued, that essentially allowed corporations, regulators and, ultimately, Congress to run roughshod over workers. “We need to restore a measure of balance to these negotiations,” he said, before voting with...

President Joe Biden and lawmakers return to Washington this week facing a lengthy lame-duck to-do list with only three weeks scheduled to resolve it — a recipe for a very un-merry holiday season should negotiations falter in the final throes of the 117th Congress. — First up: government funding, which expires Dec. 16. The verdict is still out on whether a bipartisan full-year appropriations deal i...

As we all pack up and take a quick break for Thanksgiving, the Peach State is still abuzz with activity as voters prepare to settle the final Senate race of this cycle.  On Tuesday, a new poll by the AARP — the first major public survey since the November general election — showed the race remains inside the margin of error, with incumbent Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock pulling in 51% to Republic...

It’s one of the slowest weeks in politics as our elected leaders slip into the Thanksgiving break, when they have a chance to assess the fallout from the surprising midterm results and ponder the way forward.   As you prepare your own holiday plans, you’ll probably want to be armed at the dinner table with something smart to say about the meaning of the midterms. If you want to filter out a lot of...

Playbook editor Mike DeBonis and deputy editor Zack Stanton break down the weekend in politics, including the Republican Jewish Coalition conference in Las Vegas, NV.  “2024 Republican rivals put Trump on notice,” by Alex Isenstadt in Las Vegas: “If former President Donald Trump thought his early 2024 announcement would cow prospective Republican primary rivals into submission, he clearly miscalcu...

On Wednesday night, just before 11 p.m., Nancy Pelosi's longtime spokesperson Drew Hammill announced on Twitter that today, the speaker will finally announce her plans for the future — putting an end to mounting speculation about whether she’ll retire (a possibility Hammill has batted away), stay on as the top House Democrat or step down from leadership but continue to serve in Congress. “@Speaker...

You’ve heard allies of Rep. Kevin McCarthy say it a gazillion times — and they’ll say it another gazillion times over before the House speaker vote in January: You can’t beat somebody with nobody. But what if history repeats itself? What if McCarthy, as in his 2015 bid for the speakership, fails to appease the renegade right and falls short of the 218 votes he needs to seize the gavel? With 31 Hou...

As the Republican Party wrestles with whether it should stick with its three current leaders — Donald Trump, Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell — today is crucial, especially for the first two.  McCarthy faces a vote of House Republicans on whether he will be their nominee for speaker in January. He should easily pass that test, but the margin will tell us how much trouble he’s in. (More on McCart...

For Republicans, Festivus comes early this year. In fact, it starts today at 4:30 p.m. That’s when House Republicans kick off their candidate forum for leadership positions next Congress — the first formal event in what is expected to be a weeklong, party-wide Airing of Grievances following Republicans’ abysmal Election Day performance.  Plus Mitch McConnell, we hear, is confident of his own reele...

When John Boehner suddenly retired in 2015, members of the House Freedom Caucus showed up at speaker-in-waiting Kevin McCarthy’s office with a list of demands: In exchange for their support, they wanted McCarthy to name one of their own to a senior leadership position and embrace rules changes that empowered conservatives.  If he refused, they told him, they would band together to block him from s...

Let’s start with Joe Biden.  A midterm is a referendum on the president. By all historic measures, voters should have handed Biden’s party a massive rebuke. Inflation is at historic levels, crime is up, Biden’s approval is underwater, Democrats have one-party control. The party of recent presidents in similar circumstances lost between 40 and 63 House seats. And yet here’s where things stand this...

Every ad has been cut. Every speech has been delivered. Every poll has been taken. And now we wait for the voters to decide.  Needless to say, the stakes are high. Inflation is at a 40-year peak, abortion rights are on the ballot, rising interest rates are stoking recession fears and election deniers are on the cusp of taking office. But no one has more riding on the outcome than President Joe Bid...

We’re truly in the home stretch with one day to go until Election Day. That means we are running out of precious time to deploy our favorite campaign season cliches. So allow us to note: It all comes down to turnout. And as we all know, the only poll that matters is the one on Election Day... Playbook editor Mike DeBonis and Playbook co-author Ryan Lizza preview the crucial week ahead, including,...

Oprah Winfrey endorsed Democrat John Fetterman  in the ultratight Pennsylvania Senate race during a virtual GOTV event Thursday night. More than just another celebrity endorsement, it’s a pointed snub by Winfrey of Mehmet Oz, the celebrity doctor she single-handedly brought to national prominence. "If I lived in Pennsylvania,” she said, “I would've already cast my vote for John Fetterman, for many...

There are just six days left in this chaotic midterm, which means campaigns around the country are readying their final pitches for voters.  Candidates traditionally use their last flight of ads as a “closing argument” — a chance to tell voters who they are, what they plan to do if they win and, most importantly, ask for their vote. It’s the executive summary of their campaign, typically delivered...

Even though it was Halloween, two political extremists were unmasked yesterday, one on each coast. What they said tells us a lot about the future of political violence in America. In Washington, at the Oath Keeper trial, Graydon Young, the first Oath Keeper to plead guilty to charges related to storming Congress on Jan. 6, broke down in tears as he apologized for his role. “I guess I was acting li...

Another landmark Supreme Court decision from the 1970s is likely to fall. This morning, SCOTUS will hear oral arguments in two cases challenging the use of race in college admissions at Harvard and the University of North Carolina.  There is little mystery about the outcome.  And Playbook deputy editor Zack Stanton stops by to give updates on key midterm Senate and House races just eight days away...

For months, President Joe Biden and Donald Trump have been shadow-boxing on the campaign trail — zig-zagging across the country on parallel paths that never quite intersected. That’s about to change. On the final weekend before Election Day, both men will campaign in Pennsylvania — “the must-win battleground has emerged as a proxy fight between the two,” report Christopher Cadelago and Meridith Mc...