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.

When you live in Washington, D.C., it’s easy to think the whole city runs on politics. But spend any time here — especially in the fall, when the Capitals and the Commanders and half a dozen other teams are all playing at once — and you realize pretty quickly that sports is what actually brings people together.

That’s where my conversation with Jeff Dooley starts this week. Jeff is an editor at NOTUS, where he’s building a local news operation from scratch — covering DC sports, food, news, and arts and culture. He grew up in Falls Church, Virginia, where reading the Washington Post sports section gave him his first love of journalism. And now he’s helping build the kind of coverage he grew up with, for a city that is hungry for exactly that.

We talked about the Nationals this season — a team where fans, after years of a pretty aimless rebuild, finally have a reason to care again. We talked about the Commanders, the RFK site, and a new ownership group that’s making real investments that players and fans are actually noticing. And we talked about the bigger thing underneath all of it: the way local sports coverage is part of what holds a community together.

“To understand sports is to understand life and to understand human nature and decision making,” Jeff told me. I’ve been turning that line over ever since we recorded.

Jeff also gave listeners a preview of something I’m genuinely excited about: NOTUS is launching a free local newsletter at the end of July — delivered to your inbox every morning, covering DC news, sports, food, and more. You can sign up now on any article page at notus.org, and I’ve included the link in the show notes.

This is the final episode of our month-long NOTUS takeover of The Friday Reporter — and it’s been one of my favorite months of conversations in a long time. From Kadia and Paul to Deirdre to Jeff, every guest reminded me of what great journalism looks like when people actually care about the community they’re covering.

I’m so grateful to everyone at NOTUS for making this happen. And I’m grateful, as always, to you for listening.

Watch the full conversation on YouTube.

— Lisa

This week I sat down with Alyssa Rosenberg — dean of the Allbritton Journalism Institute, the organization behind NOTUS — for the third episode of our month-long NOTUS takeover series. Alyssa spent more than 20 years at the Washington Post as a reporter, editor and cultural critic before taking a buyout in 2025 and doing something most journalists would never admit to out loud: going looking for a good pirate ship to join.She found one. And our conversation ranged across the entire landscape of what journalism is becoming — the skills young reporters need now that didn’t exist when we started out, what breaks when a news organization violates the implicit compact with its readers, why politics has become just another entertainment fandom, and what the next five years might actually look like.I’ll be honest: I came in with a theory I’d been testing — that the loss of local journalism is driving the nationalization of politics. Alyssa pushed back on it, and she was right. The parties themselves are driving a lot of that conformity. Having someone challenge a premise that carefully, with that much context from inside the industry, is exactly what I love about these conversations.Three moments I keep coming back to:

“There are so few pathways for young people to come to D.C. and to do so especially if they don’t have family money, if they can’t afford to sort of take a risk.”

“Our politics have become sort of yet another fandom, yet another entertainment arena. And I don’t think that’s particularly healthy from a civic perspective.”

“The ability to go out and find facts in the real world is going to end up being more valuable than ever.”

TAKEAWAY

In a media moment full of doom and gloom, Alyssa’s clearest argument is an optimistic one: the same tools that have destabilized the old journalism business model are about to unlock a generation of journalists whose instincts were never fully matched by the platforms available to them. The nerds are coming — and they’re going to be incredible.

Some of the most interesting conversations I’ve had on this show are the ones where I’m actually talking to a peer — someone who’s been doing this work at the same time I have, in the same city, navigating the same chaos.

That’s this episode.

Deirdre Walsh has been covering Capitol Hill since 2006 — CNN first, then NPR, now NOTUS, where she’s helping lead a newsroom that is genuinely doing something different. I’ve known Deirdre for years, and this is one of those conversations where I kept thinking: more people should hear this.

We got into a lot of things. How being a parent changed the stories she pitched — when Congress was debating a social media bill and she was simultaneously fighting her teenager about Discord, she knew that story from the inside in a way no briefing book could give her. The camaraderie of the Capitol Hill press corps — the informal COVID pool, the shared files, the reporter-to-reporter trust that outsiders almost never see. The shrinking number of members she can trust not to spin her, and why that matters more than it might seem.

And a few things that surprised even me. There is a pickleball court on the fifth floor of the Dirksen Senate Office Building. Ted Cruz plays basketball there. Kirsten Gillibrand plays tennis. The Pickleball Caucus has converted it twice a week. I did not know this.

But the story I keep thinking about is the STOCK Act loophole she cracked in 2012. She covered the bill for months. A source offhandedly mentioned that the House and Senate were interpreting the rules differently. She started pulling on that thread with her colleague Dana Bash. What they found: one chamber’s interpretation let congressional spouses trade on insider knowledge without ever having to disclose it. They reported it. Congress closed the loophole a few days later. “You always dream of making Congress react to your reporting,” she said. That’s the dream and she lived it.

The advice she carries from her first job — watching Judy Woodruff prepare — is simple: do the work you can control. Be ready. Then adjust.

That one lands.

For the next month, The Friday Reporter is in the hands of NOTUS.

If you haven’t been paying close attention to what’s happening over there, now is the time to start. In a moment when most Washington newsrooms are contracting — the Washington Post went from roughly 1,000 to 400 people in three years — NOTUS is doing the opposite. It’s attracting some of the best reporters in the business, investing in a serious fellows program, and breaking news every week.

This week, I sat down with two of its newest and most high-profile additions: Kadia Goba, who came to NOTUS from the Post (via BuzzFeed News), and Paul Kane, who spent 19 years and three months at the Post before the February 4th layoffs became what he called his “before and after” moment.

Both of them cover Capitol Hill every day. And both of them see things most people miss.

PK’s framing stuck with me: the public already has a brutally low opinion of Congress — a 10% approval rating in Gallup. But even with that as the baseline, most people still don’t understand how little is actually getting accomplished. Last year was the lowest legislative output in recorded history. The Senate spent three-quarters of its time processing executive nominations. The noise of apparent conflict gives the impression that things are happening. They aren’t.

The counterintuitive insight that surprised me most: the Freedom Caucus — the most conservative bloc in the House — are actually among the biggest supporters of the mainstream press. They beeline for Manu Raju’s camera after every vote. They give reporters their cell numbers. If Speaker Johnson ever tried to curtail press access, PK says the Freedom Caucus would revolt. I believe him.

There’s also a genuinely hopeful note in this conversation. The incoming freshman classes of 2026 weren’t in Washington on January 6th. They don’t carry the same scar tissue. PK thinks that matters. So do I.

It’s a conversation that left me more optimistic about journalism — and more clear-eyed about Congress — than I’ve been in a while.

Watch the full episode on YouTube

There’s a conversation I come back to every so often in this work — the kind where you walk away thinking differently about something you assumed you understood. This week’s episode was one of those.

I sat down with Chad Peace, the voter advocate and attorney behind the More Choice initiative and the Independent Voter Project. If you’ve heard of California’s top-two primary — the system where the two highest vote-getters in a primary advance to the general, regardless of party — Chad was one of the architects. He’s spent years in courtrooms and state legislatures arguing for something that sounds deceptively simple: that the right to vote should belong to you, the individual, not to the party you join.

The conversation that stuck with me was about incentives. Right now, our election system rewards division. You don’t have to win by being good — you can win by making your opponent look terrible. That’s not a bug in the system. It’s the design. And it’s why we keep electing people who are better at tearing things down than building consensus.

More Choice — Chad’s proposed next step beyond the top-two — would advance four or more candidates to November and give voters the ability to rank their preferences. The idea is simple: if second- and third-place votes matter, you can’t win just by going negative. You have to actually persuade people who don’t already agree with you. That changes the calculus completely.

I also appreciated how clear-eyed Chad is about the opposition. Both parties — left and right — want to get rid of the top-two. They call it a “jungle primary” (a term he correctly identifies as deliberately pejorative). Their solution? Go back to closed primaries, where party members pick the candidates and everyone else chooses from whatever’s left in November.

His response: that’s not reform. That’s consolidating power.

Chad grew up between a Republican family on his mom’s side and a Kentucky Democrat on his father’s. They never fought at the dinner table. They respected each other. He believes most voters are actually like that — closer to the middle than our political system reflects. The system just isn’t built to show it.

This one is worth your time, whether you follow election reform closely or you just found yourself standing in a voting booth last November thinking: really? These are my only options?

Full episode is on YouTube now.

— Lisa