I’ve spent a lot of election nights the same way most political junkies have — tracking ratings, refreshing results, trying to guess which seats will flip before the networks call them. What I’d never really thought about is who actually makes those ratings in the first place, or how much judgment goes into a label as simple as “toss-up.”

This week I sat down with Erin Covey, who leads House race coverage for The Cook Political Report, to kick off a month of conversations with their team. She told me something that stopped me: the team behind every rating you’ve ever cited is nine people. Nine people, tracking roughly 40 competitive House races every single week, plus the Senate, the governors, and the presidency every four years.

What struck me most was how much of the job is restraint. It would be easier, in some ways, to call every close race a toss-up and let the outcome sort itself out. Erin pushed back on that instinct directly — the whole point of the exercise is to make a call, even when the call might be wrong.

She also walked me through Texas’s 23rd, a seat that should be safely Republican and isn’t anymore — not because of redistricting or national trends, but because of exactly who’s on the ballot. It’s a reminder that all the modeling in the world still runs into the fact that candidates are people, and people are unpredictable.

And I loved her answer when I asked whether growing up outside Washington — in a military family, across the South and overseas — changes how she reads a district. Her answer, below, is the whole thesis of good political journalism.

Notable Quotes from Today’s Episode

“It’s our team, which is smaller than a lot of people expect. Currently, nine members on our team.” — Erin Covey

“If we put everything in toss-up, then we wouldn’t really be making any predictions at all, right?” — Erin Covey

“There’s something inherently important about having lived outside the Beltway to understand that you can’t apply the same rules or the same filter for each and every district because they all are so inherently different.” — Erin Covey

My Takeaway

Behind every House rating you read this fall is a small team making deliberate, sometimes uncomfortable calls — and the districts that surprise us usually do so because of the person on the ballot, not the map underneath them.

The full conversation — on toss-ups, cash, and the Texas seat nobody expected to be competitive — is live on YouTube now. First of a month of Cook Political Report guests on the show.

For five and a half years, this show has been about someone else — pulling a thread from a guest I find fascinating and following it wherever it leads. This week, for the first time, I turned the camera on myself.

After a recent conversation with my business coach, I realized I had never articulated — through my lens — what connects every single person who’s ever sat across from me on this show. Journalists. Communicators. Photographers. Lobbyists. To an outsider, the connection may not be altogether clear, so I chose today to fix that.

I was surprised to realize how far back the real answer goes — past the podcast, past the public affairs career, back to a small legislative district in New Jersey where I learned that making someone feel seen gave me my own purpose. That idea became the thread of this episode.

I’m also using today’s episode to signal a short break from this show — the first real break I’ve taken in five and a half years — and ahead to an exciting August takeover with Cook Political Report.

My favorite line of the episode: the moment you actually see someone — really see them — it gets a lot harder to hold onto anger at them. Connection isn’t just nice to have. It’s what makes compassion possible.

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I’ve spent years learning how to prep for interviews, testimony, TV hits — the words, the pacing, the message. What I hadn’t spent much time thinking about is the split second before any of that: the photo someone sees before they ever hear you speak.

That’s exactly the space my guest this week lives in. Mira Adwell is a photographer who spent years shooting fashion editorial in Charleston before relocating back to DC, where she now works almost exclusively in portraits and personal branding — CEOs, senators, first-time founders, all trying to figure out how to show up.

What struck me most is how much of her job is actually psychology. She watches for the signs most people think they’re hiding — shallow breathing, a dry mouth, fidgeting hands — and instead of pushing through a shoot, she puts the camera down and just talks. By the time she picks the camera back up, the nerves are gone.

She also relayed something Kevin O’Leary told her directly — blunt, but it’s the whole argument for why this matters.

My favorite line of the conversation was about this city specifically. Mira sees it constantly in her DC clients — the low-grade performance anxiety of a town where perception never fully switches off.