The Chuck ToddCast

Florida State Rep. Angie Nixon — the Jacksonville union organizer and DSA member who upset Alex Vindman in the Senate primary despite being outraised roughly 16-to-1 — joins the Chuck ToddCast. She explains how she got into politics through community organizing, why she associates with the DSA while not agreeing with everything it wants, and argues Democrats lost Florida because they d...

Chuck Todd opens with the attempted hijacking of a Dubai-to-Tel Aviv flight and the reminder that history turns as much on what almost happened as what did. With 33 days to the midterms, Ken Paxton got caught on tape at a private event calling Trump's midterm convention a negative — and is now in full cleanup mode, nervous about having crossed the president. Chuck returns to the Eric Schmitt...

Chuck Todd opens with the attempted hijacking of a Dubai-to-Tel Aviv flight and the reminder that history turns as much on what almost happened as what did. With 33 days to the midterms, Ken Paxton got caught on tape at a private event calling Trump's midterm convention a negative — and is now in full cleanup mode, nervous about having crossed the president. Chuck returns to the Eric Schmitt...

CNN chief political correspondent Dana Bash joins the Chuck ToddCast to discuss The Elections That Changed the World , out September 22nd, which she wrote with David Fisher. The fifteen elections she chose stretch from Julius Caesar — who ran partly because he was deeply indebted and didn't want to be prosecuted — to Nelson Mandela, and "election" is defined loosely enough to include P...

Chuck Todd opens by correcting Jon Stewart, who made him a punchline Monday — before turning to the circus at Tuesday's Jack Smith hearing. Missouri Sen. Eric Schmitt, a potential 2028 VP pick, thought he'd caught Smith perjuring himself with text messages placing him at an Atlanta Hawks game the day after the Fani Willis affair broke. Smith was at an Iowa Hawkeyes women's game in Maryland....

Chuck Todd opens by correcting Jon Stewart, who made him a punchline Monday — before turning to the circus at Tuesday's Jack Smith hearing. Missouri Sen. Eric Schmitt, a potential 2028 VP pick, thought he'd caught Smith perjuring himself with text messages placing him at an Atlanta Hawks game the day after the Fani Willis affair broke. Smith was at an Iowa Hawkeyes women's game in Maryland....

Thirty-five days out, Chuck Todd and Chris Cillizza open on a president playing the hits: Trump spent the weekend at a football game and a golf tournament, then announced his campaign tour kicks off in Durant, Oklahoma and Mobile, Alabama — the site of his first mega-rally in 2015 — rather than anywhere control of Congress is being decided. The more consequential move was rejecting Ira...

Former Agriculture Secretary and two-term Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack — the longest-serving USDA secretary of the modern era, now CEO of the World Food Prize Foundation — joins the Chuck ToddCast to explain what's actually happening in farm country. The Iran war has driven up input costs while deportations gut the labor supply, farmers get blamed for high prices despite capturing the sma...

Chuck Todd zeroes in on a president who has become the entire election: Trump spent the weekend at a football game and a golf tournament while Americans struggle, announced he'd rejected an Iran deal as though he holds all the cards, and now sits at 37% approval in a new WSJ poll — the lowest for any president heading into a midterm in their polling since 1990, with 11% of his own 2024 voter...

Chuck Todd zeroes in on a president who has become the entire election: Trump spent the weekend at a football game and a golf tournament while Americans struggle, announced he'd rejected an Iran deal as though he holds all the cards, and now sits at 37% approval in a new WSJ poll — the lowest for any president heading into a midterm in their polling since 1990, with 11% of his own 2024 voter...

Chuck Todd and J.A. Adande go back to the unlikely beginnings of one of the NFL’s most iconic franchises. From Curly Lambeau and the team’s unusual origin story to the community ownership structure that helped keep the Packers in Green Bay, they explore how a small Wisconsin city survived while other early NFL towns disappeared. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Adam Brandon — who ran FreedomWorks for over a decade and now co-founded the Independent Leadership Council alongside Joe Manchin — joins the Chuck ToddCast to make the case that a handful of independents could break Washington's logjam. His argument: the parties have shrunk their tents, the blue dogs and moderate Republicans of the 1990s are gone, and in an era of slim majorities, ten...

Chuck Todd argues you don't need a poll to read the midterms — Republican behavior tells you everything. JD Vance is conceding things aren't going well, nobody's buying that it's Biden's economy anymore, and Tim Scott told the NRSC they're in "the fight for their lives," though his 2022 comparison misses that Democrats had Dobbs and Republicans have no equivalent in 2026. Todd's larger argum...

Chuck Todd argues you don't need a poll to read the midterms — Republican behavior tells you everything. JD Vance is conceding things aren't going well, nobody's buying that it's Biden's economy anymore, and Tim Scott told the NRSC they're in "the fight for their lives," though his 2022 comparison misses that Democrats had Dobbs and Republicans have no equivalent in 2026. Todd's larger argum...

Anthony Scaramucci returns to the Chuck ToddCast with All the Wrong Moves , out September 22nd, which argues Trump is a symptom rather than the disease — the product of three decades of bipartisan mistakes: Clinton's China trade deal, Bush waging war while cutting taxes, and Obama's bailout that rescued Wall Street while leaving ordinary families behind. He and Chuck also revisit the private...

Chuck Todd digs into ProPublica's bombshell on Susan Collins, which details how her office steered millions in federal contracts to defense firm Navatek while her campaign operation pumped CEO Martin Kao's network for donations — sometimes cut within 24 hours of the defense spending bill clearing a Senate hurdle — and how the FBI's pay-to-play investigation died after Trump's purge of...

Chuck Todd digs into ProPublica's bombshell on Susan Collins, which details how her office steered millions in federal contracts to defense firm Navatek while her campaign operation pumped CEO Martin Kao's network for donations — sometimes cut within 24 hours of the defense spending bill clearing a Senate hurdle — and how the FBI's pay-to-play investigation died after Trump's purge of...

Six weeks out, Chuck Todd and Chris Cillizza open on Trump's ban of CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House — escalated Monday when the rest of the TV pool refused to cover him without CNN. Chuck, who fought the Obama White House's attempt to cut Fox out of a pool, explains why the real story is why now : a president lashing out as he loses control everywhere else. NBC has Trump at 41%...

Louisiana Congressman Troy Carter joins the Chuck ToddCast to talk about a state whose bipartisan political culture — he worked productively with Mike Johnson in the statehouse — has been steamrolled by a president who's made clear he doesn't want to work with Democrats at all. Carter notes the irony that a majority of Johnson's own district is Medicaid-dependent in a state that never...

Chuck Todd argues we've entered end-stage Trump — the most dangerous phase — as the president lashes out at a reality that keeps refusing to cooperate: raiding the Pentagon to fund his vanity arch, banning news outlets from the White House over coverage he dislikes. The new NBC poll gives him nothing to work with. Trump's approval sits at a second-term low of 41%, 55% say his policies...

Chuck Todd argues we've entered end-stage Trump — the most dangerous phase — as the president lashes out at a reality that keeps refusing to cooperate: raiding the Pentagon to fund his vanity arch, banning news outlets from the White House over coverage he dislikes. The new NBC poll gives him nothing to work with. Trump's approval sits at a second-term low of 41%, 55% say his policies...

Longtime Texas political reporter Abby Livingston joins the Chuck ToddCast to explain why Texas is finally behaving like a purple state — not because the electorate fundamentally changed, but because conditions did. She walks through the state's political geography, 12 years of accumulated Abbott grievances (the school takeover, the unpopular THC ban), and a Republican ticket voters increasi...

Chuck Todd charts a Republican Party running out of road: the Fed hiking rates into Trump-driven inflation, JD Vance reduced to a "give us another chance" midterm pitch while Trump insists the economy is great, troops anonymously leaking photos of damaged bases, and seven Republicans now breaking with the president on War Powers. A closed-door House meeting over suspending the federal gas tax turn...

Chuck Todd charts a Republican Party running out of road: the Fed hiking rates into Trump-driven inflation, JD Vance reduced to a "give us another chance" midterm pitch while Trump insists the economy is great, troops anonymously leaking photos of damaged bases, and seven Republicans now breaking with the president on War Powers. A closed-door House meeting over suspending the federal gas tax turn...

Disclosure: Chapter is an advertiser on The Chuck ToddCast. Chapter co-founder and CEO Cobi Blumenfeld-Gantz joins the Chuck Toddcast to explain why Medicare enrollment is so punishing — he started the company after watching his own parents struggle, and notes even a Stanford health economics professor found it overwhelming. He walks through what people in their sixties should actually be do...