And we’re back with Part Two of this week’s Congressional Women’s Softball Game special.

If you listened to my first conversation with Senator Shelly Moore Capito and Emily Goodin, you already know this game is about a lot more than what happens on the field.

For this second episode, I’m joined by Atalie Ebersole and Mary Ajango, who bring another perspective on the game, the Young Survival Coalition and the community that has grown around this really remarkable Washington tradition.

We talk about why this night matters, what the Young Survival Coalition means to the women it serves and why showing up — literally — can make a difference.

The game is next Wednesday, September 23, at Audi Field.

So if you haven’t gotten your tickets yet, this is your nudge. Come watch Congress take on the Washington press corps and support a cause that deserves the attention.

Tickets are available at congwomensoftball.org.

And with that, here’s Part Two.

THE FRIDAY REPORTER

This is a special two-fer edition of The Friday Reporter because sometimes one conversation just isn’t enough.

This week, I talked with four women who know the Congressional Women’s Softball Game from very different angles — Senator Shelly Moore Capito (R-WV) and Emily Goodin (New York Post), team captains for the two teams and then Atalie Ebersole, President of the Congressional Softball Game and Mary Ajango, Young Survival Coalition.

And if you know anything about this game, you know it’s about a lot more than softball.

For 18 years, women Members of Congress have taken on the women of the Washington press corps (Bad News Babes) in a bipartisan game that has become one of Capitol Hill’s great traditions.

But the reason this game exists — and the reason it keeps going — is the Young Survival Coalition, which supports young adults diagnosed with breast cancer.

Since the game began in 2009, it has raised more than $4.3 million for YSC.

And that’s what really struck me in these conversations: the game is fun, it’s competitive, there’s plenty of trash talk — but underneath all of that is something pretty powerful. Women who spend their days on opposite sides of politics come together around a cause that has nothing to do with party.

The 18th annual game is next Wednesday, September 23, at Audi Field here in Washington.

So if you’re looking for something to do next Wednesday night, go watch some women in Congress take on the press corps — and support a really important cause while you’re at it.

Tickets are on sale now at congwomensoftball.org

Tune in and play ball!

Five weeks ago, I started talking to the team at the The Cook Political Report, one analyst at a time. This week I closed it out with the one I’d saved for last on purpose: David Wasserman, senior editor and the guy whose “I’ve seen enough” has closed out election nights for over a decade.

I told him going in I wouldn’t hold him to a prediction. He didn’t need the disclaimer. “The numbers have gone from very bad to extremely bad for President Trump and Republicans,” he told me, then walked me through exactly why that still isn’t the same thing as a sure thing.

Independents have Trump’s favorability sitting in the mid-20s. That’s a wave-election signal, by his own description. And yet Republicans still have the map. Democrats need every purple Senate seat plus two states Trump carried by double digits in 2024. Gerrymandering ate most of what should have been an easy House flip. So David gives Democrats 75 to 80 percent in the House and something close to a coin flip in the Senate. Bad numbers. Not a landslide.

What struck me most wasn’t the math. It was what he said drives it. “Everything falls under the bucket of inflation, or most everything,” he told me — healthcare premiums, gas and fertilizer prices after the Strait of Hormuz closed, tariffs squeezing farmers who voted for this. He doesn’t think those voters defect to the other side. He thinks they just stay home. James Carville figured that one out in 1992. Some things do not age.

He also let me in on something that should worry anyone who reads a poll and calls it a fact: pollsters are now modeling the views of the country off the roughly 1 percent of people who bother to pick up and answer. The best data, he said, rarely even makes it out publicly. Everyone else is reading a narrower picture than they think they are.

We closed on Iowa, which he called the most important state of 2026 — a Senate race, a governor’s race and a state more exposed to foreign trade than nearly any other in the country, all on one ballot.

Five conversations. Five people who do this work with more precision, more humility and more generosity than I expected going in. To Erin Covey, Carrie Dann, Amy Walter, Kathryn Hamm, Jessica Taylor and David Wasserman: thank you for trusting this show with your time. It was a genuinely great month.

Three moments from the conversation, below.

Key Quotes

“The numbers have gone from very bad to extremely bad for President Trump and Republicans.” — David Wasserman

“Everything falls under the bucket of inflation, or most everything.” — David Wasserman

“We’re relying in some cases on the 1% or less of people who are agreeing to take the survey to model the attitudes of the other 99%.” — David Wasserman

Takeaway

The environment is bad enough for Republicans to look historic, and structurally advantaged enough that it might not be. Whoever tells you they already know how November ends is skipping the second half of that sentence.

Host Notes

Jessica Taylor talks to more candidates, in more states, than almost anyone else in Washington — and this week, in the fourth stop of my month with the team at the The Cook Political Report, I finally got to ask her what she’s hearing that the rest of us aren’t.

Her answer surprised me: data centers. Not tariffs, not immigration — data centers. She’s hearing organic, unscripted anger about them from candidates in Ohio’s Senate race and Wisconsin’s and Kansas’s governor’s races, all on their own, unprompted. She says the industry is losing the PR fight badly enough that the phrase she hears everywhere — from teenagers to voters at campaign stops — is simply: AI will take my job.

Then there’s Rob Sand. He’s the only Democrat holding statewide office in Iowa, and Jessica’s one of the few analysts who’s sat down with him more than once this cycle. He holds county meetings across the state and opens each one by singing “God Bless America” and “America the Beautiful,” then says a prayer. His pitch isn’t redder or bluer, he says — it’s “better and truer.” Jessica’s read: Republicans don’t feel great about where this race is headed.

What stuck with me most, though, wasn’t a single race — it was her theory of the moment we’re in. Neither Barack Obama nor Donald Trump, she told me, built a party that outlasts them. Both coalitions showed up when their namesake was on the ballot and stayed home when he wasn’t. So is American politics just going to keep getting more person-centric, more cult-of-personality, because that’s what actually motivates people to vote? Or does someone eventually build something that lasts past themselves? She doesn’t know. Neither do I. But it’s the right question heading into 2028.

She also pushed back, hard, on the idea that a Democratic wave is coming — redistricting has left too few competitive seats for a 2018-style blowout, she says, and if Democrats do flip the Senate, it’ll be centrists like Roy Cooper and Sherrod Brown who get them there, not the loudest voices in the primary.

And she closed with the myth she most wants people to retire - that social media buzz translates into actual votes. You can raise money online. You can go viral. “But the fundamentals are still the fundamentals.”

Three moments from our conversation, below.

Pull Quotes

“I hear all the time from not only the teenagers that live in my home, but like everywhere I go, the words, AI will take my job.” — Jessica Taylor

“He opens by, you know, singing God Bless America and America the Beautiful and with a prayer... not redder or bluer, but better and truer.” — Jessica Taylor, on Rob Sand

“I think that social media buzz is going to translate to votes [is the myth]... the fundamentals are still the fundamentals, I think.” — Jessica Taylor

Takeaway

The 2026 map isn’t being reshaped by a wave in either direction — it’s being reshaped by data-center backlash, candidates who can cross party lines in person, and a growing sense that no single leader can hand their coalition off to the next one.

Getting Amy Walter on this show once felt like a win. Getting her back a second time, this week, with Kathryn Hamm in the room too, felt like something else entirely — a vote of confidence I don’t take lightly.

This is the third stop in my month with the team at The Cook Political Report, after conversations with House editor Erin Covey and managing editor Carrie Dann. But this one is different. Amy is the person who inherited Charlie Cook’s operation and has spent her career protecting the trust he built. Kathryn is the person who runs the business behind it — the partnerships, the access, the infrastructure that lets an operation of nine people reach a country of millions.

What struck me most wasn’t the political analysis, though there was plenty of that. It was how deliberately both of them talked about staying nonpartisan. Amy told me it isn’t a talent, it’s a discipline — something she has to practice, especially when a source says something that gets her “a little hot under the collar.” Kathryn’s read on the moment we’re in was even sharper. She said the thing she hears most isn’t that people don’t trust anyone anymore. It’s that they’ve stopped listening entirely. That’s a different problem.

And then there was the thing that actually explains why the Cook Political Report works: they’ve never sold a single ad. When you subscribe, you’re paying for a clean, straightforward read with no agenda attached — no clutter, no pop-ups, no sponsor with a thumb on the scale. That business model isn’t incidental to the trust. It is the trust.

We closed with a lightning round. Amy’s answer stuck with me: the most undercovered story in politics right now isn’t this November, it’s 2027 — the largest freshman class in the House in at least 30 years, arriving with two competing mandates, to fight Trump or to support him, headed straight into a leadership structure that’s barely settled in itself.

Charlie Cook built something extraordinary. Watching Amy and Kathryn talk about what it takes to keep it that way, on purpose, every single day, made it clear this isn’t inherited good fortune. It’s work. I respect the hell out of what this team does.

Three moments from the conversation, below.

Key Quotes

“The most important thing you can have anywhere, but especially in this town, is your credibility and your reputation. And it takes a long time to build it up and it doesn’t take a very long time to lose it.” — Amy Walter

“The first thing I hear most often isn’t even, I don’t trust anyone anymore. It’s, I stop listening.” — Kathryn Hamm

“When you come to the Cook Political Report, you’re paying a subscription and that means you get a clean experience.” — Amy Walter

Takeaway

The Cook Political Report’s credibility isn’t an accident of longevity — it’s a daily discipline, reinforced by a business model with no ads and no agenda to protect.

The full conversation with Amy Walter and Kathryn Hamm of the Cook Political Report is live on YouTube now. Third stop in our month with the team behind the gold standard.

I’ve spent a long time in rooms where people talk about political race ratings like they’re handed down from on high — toss-up, lean R, safe D — as if there’s a formula somewhere spitting out certainty. Carrie Dann told me this week that she believed that too, once, from the outside.

Carrie spent almost eighteen years in NBC News’ Washington bureau — an embedded campaign reporter, an editor, eventually running the network’s Capitol Hill team — before she became Managing Editor of the The Cook Political Report. When she got there, she admitted something I loved: she pictured the ratings coming down like “stone tablets from Amy Walter on high.” Then she watched how they’re actually made, and the reverence gave way to something more interesting — nine people, meeting candidates, tracking fundraising, arguing over how much weight to give a single news cycle. Part quantitative, part qualitative, as she put it. Neither art nor science. In between.

What stuck with me most, though, wasn’t the process — it was what she said about failure. In 2012, her editors gave her what they called the best assignment on the beat: cover the man everyone assumed would be the Republican nominee. He wasn’t. Watching that campaign collapse in real time, she told me, taught her more than any winning campaign ever has. There’s something in that for anyone who covers, predicts, or works in politics for a living — the stories that don’t pan out are usually where the real education happens.

And then there was the number that stayed with me after we talked: new Gallup data found that roughly half of Americans aren’t confident their own ballot will be counted correctly. Carrie called it “a really alarming stat,” and she’s right that it isn’t getting nearly the urgency it deserves — not from candidates, not from officials, not from those of us in the media.

This is the second stop in our month-long takeover with the Cook Political Report, and Carrie’s conversation left me thinking differently about how much human judgment sits underneath every rating I’ve ever casually cited. Three moments that stayed with me, below.

Notable Quotes

“I envisioned these stone tablets coming down from Amy Walter on high of like, this is how we pronounce how these races are going to turn out.” — Carrie Dann

“Campaigns that are unsuccessful teach you a lot more, I think, as a reporter, than campaigns that are successful.” — Carrie Dann

“Voters and candidates are human people… they are driven by their lived experience… which is why every election is about the economy.” — Carrie Dann

Takeaway

The ratings everyone treats as certainty are made by people who know exactly how much could go wrong — and it’s the losing campaigns, not the winning ones, that teach them the most.

The full conversation with Carrie Dann — on stone tablets, failed frontrunners, and the number that should worry all of us — is live on YouTube now. Second stop in our month with the Cook Political Report.

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.