The Chuck ToddCast

Chuck Todd breaks down a NYT/Siena poll showing Democrats up 8 on the generic ballot and leading independents by 23 — numbers that would mean 25-30 House seats and 4-6 Senate seats, with Trump polling worse than he did before the 2018 wave. He argues the Justice Department, FBI, and Pentagon damage will take a generation to repair, that Thomas Massie's impeachment articles against Hegseth us...

Chuck Todd breaks down a NYT/Siena poll showing Democrats up 8 on the generic ballot and leading independents by 23 — numbers that would mean 25-30 House seats and 4-6 Senate seats, with Trump polling worse than he did before the 2018 wave. He argues the Justice Department, FBI, and Pentagon damage will take a generation to repair, that Thomas Massie's impeachment articles against Hegseth us...

Chuck Todd and Chris Cillizza open with a thesis worth marking on a calendar: the next two weeks may be the most consequential stretch of the campaign. Axios data shows Republicans outspending Democrats in every competitive state — $64 million in Texas, $45 million in Ohio — and Chuck's test is specific: if the ads work, Democratic numbers tick down and undecideds tick up by October 1s...

Chuck Todd connects two crises with the same root: nobody in charge is willing to stop. AI CEOs now openly concede their technology could end humanity — Dario Amodei published an essay arguing development needs to slow down — while the companies pour money into the midterms lobbying to let Washington overrule state regulators, and OpenAI's own models escape a sandbox to hack Hugging Fa...

Veteran political strategist Maria Comella — who has worked for Chris Christie, Rudy Giuliani, and Democrats alike — joins the Chuck Toddcast to argue that political consulting has become an industry with no character test left in it. Using the Graham Platner saga as a case study, she and Todd examine what consultants owe voters when they know a candidate's flaws, why the staffer who w...

Chuck Todd connects two crises with the same root: nobody in charge is willing to stop. AI CEOs now openly concede their technology could end humanity — Dario Amodei published an essay arguing development needs to slow down — while the companies pour money into the midterms lobbying to let Washington overrule state regulators, and OpenAI's own models escape a sandbox to hack Hugging Fa...

Lawfare senior editor Molly Roberts joins the Chuck Toddcast to walk through the "rogue clerk" scenario — the theory circulating online that House Republicans could hold power on January 3rd regardless of what voters do in November. Her piece on it has been called the most comprehensive analysis written to date, and her conclusion is genuinely nuanced: this is worth taking seriously without...

Chuck Todd argues AI alarmism just hit its break-glass moment. Jacob Coxon, a researcher who spent three years on pretraining at OpenAI and Anthropic, resigned Tuesday and posted that neither company is acting responsibly — that they're "racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives". Chuck had assumed some of this fearmongering was a marketing tactic. He no...

Chuck Todd argues AI alarmism just hit its break-glass moment. Jacob Coxon, a researcher who spent three years on pretraining at OpenAI and Anthropic, resigned Tuesday and posted that neither company is acting responsibly — that they're "racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives". Chuck had assumed some of this fearmongering was a marketing tactic. He no...

Anthony Tommasini — chief classical music critic for the New York Times from 2000 to 2021 — joins the Chuck Toddcast to discuss Voice of a Century: The Life and Artistry of Marian Anderson , out September 8th as part of the Significations series curated by Henry Louis Gates Jr. Tommasini didn't seek the project; he was asked to write it. His argument is that Anderson has been flattened...

Chuck Todd reads the New Hampshire results as a straightforward establishment win — the progressive dog didn't bark, outside groups largely stayed out, and Jeanne Shaheen's decades of organization-building still define the state party. He expects a four-to-six point Senate race and would be surprised, though not shocked, if it flipped, since Sununu's politics run a bit conservative for New H...

Chuck Todd reads the New Hampshire results as a straightforward establishment win — the progressive dog didn't bark, outside groups largely stayed out, and Jeanne Shaheen's decades of organization-building still define the state party. He expects a four-to-six point Senate race and would be surprised, though not shocked, if it flipped, since Sununu's politics run a bit conservative for New H...

Chuck Todd and J.A. Adande sit down with ESPN’s Paul Finebaum and dive into Alabama football. Finebaum shares his perspective on Bear Bryant’s complicated legacy and the integration of Alabama football, explains why Nick Saban succeeded where so many post-Bryant coaches failed, and reveals how Saban established total control over the program from the moment he arrived in Tuscaloosa. Pl...

Eight Tuesdays out, Chuck Todd and Chris Cillizza open on the first midterm convention in modern American history — two nights at Dallas's American Airlines Center with 109 speakers, Trump appearing both nights, and House members getting billed $25,000 to attend. The guys are skeptical of nearly all of it: the event lands on NFL kickoff night, it butts up against the 25th anniversary of Sept...

Bruce Mehlman — founding partner of the bipartisan Mehlman Consulting and the man behind the quarterly slide decks that circulate through half of official Washington — joins the Chuck Toddcast to assess a bifurcated economy and the bills coming due. Millennials are wealthier than their parents were at this age but far more stressed, housing is inflated by a supply shortage, and the cen...

With the fall campaign officially underway after Labor Day, Chuck Todd lays out three scenarios for November and assigns odds to each. A blue mirage (15%) — Democrats still take the House but net only two Senate seats, saved by Republican money from tech and crypto, because you can't buy a new national mood but you can absolutely save individual candidates. A blue wave (50%), the 2006 compar...

With the fall campaign officially underway after Labor Day, Chuck Todd lays out three scenarios for November and assigns odds to each. A blue mirage (15%) — Democrats still take the House but net only two Senate seats, saved by Republican money from tech and crypto, because you can't buy a new national mood but you can absolutely save individual candidates. A blue wave (50%), the 2006 compar...

Documentarian Brian Knappenberger joins the Chuck Toddcast to discuss Turning Point: Generation 9/11 , out on Netflix September 2nd — a film built around a striking fact: more than half of Americans were either born after 2001 or were too young to remember it. Knappenberger's aim was to bring that generation into the moment, capturing not just the attack but the fear and uncertainty that fol...

Chuck Todd reads the tea leaves on a building Democratic wave: primary turnout is up 35% over 2022 while Republican turnout is down 4%, and Todd argues voter behavior is a far better predictor than polling — though it's a tea leaf, not a guarantee. He then digs into an underappreciated dynamic that could decide Senate control: governor's races make the weather. Texas, Chuck argues, is now mo...

Chuck Todd reads the tea leaves on a building Democratic wave: primary turnout is up 35% over 2022 while Republican turnout is down 4%, and Todd argues voter behavior is a far better predictor than polling — though it's a tea leaf, not a guarantee. He then digs into an underappreciated dynamic that could decide Senate control: governor's races make the weather. Texas, Chuck argues, is now mo...

Inside ten weeks to the midterms, Chuck Todd and Chris Cillizza start with the race Republicans have suddenly woken up to: Texas. With Talarico sitting on $21.5 million to Paxton's $1.75 million, Cornyn refusing to raise money in-state, and John Kennedy telling Fox News flatly that the Senate doesn't have the money budgeted for Texas, the guys argue the GOP's comfort blanket — that this is a...

Ohio Governor Mike DeWine joins the Chuck Toddcast in his final months in office and, freed from ever facing voters again, says exactly what he thinks. The headline is his reversal on capital punishment: DeWine helped write Ohio's death penalty statute as a state senator in 1981 and defended it as attorney general, but in June he called on the legislature to abolish it, saying the moral justificat...

Chuck Todd argues the entire 2026 election is collapsing into a single issue — prices — and that every other story is just a contributing factor. The problem for Republicans is that the economy is going to get worse, not better: price pressure is building across the food supply, the Iran war has disrupted fuel and fertilizer, JP Morgan is warning food inflation could hit 5% by 2027, an...

Chuck Todd argues the entire 2026 election is collapsing into a single issue — prices — and that every other story is just a contributing factor. The problem for Republicans is that the economy is going to get worse, not better: price pressure is building across the food supply, the Iran war has disrupted fuel and fertilizer, JP Morgan is warning food inflation could hit 5% by 2027, an...

Former Trump White House Communications Director and author of the upcoming book All the Wrong Moves: How Three Catastrophic Decisions Led to the Rise of Trump, Anthony Scaramucci joins the Chuck Toddcast, picking up a conversation the two started in Abu Dhabi just before the Iran war — back when the gulf states were considered one of the safest places on earth. They discuss why America's mi...