Chris Riback's Conversations

Charlie Cook: This Has Been the Wildest Year

If you really want to know how good the Cook Political Report is, you’ll want to listen up – because we’ve got the real thing! Charlie Cook is Editor and Publisher of the eponymous Cook Political Report. He is also a National Journal columnist, and it’s only a slight exaggeration that there is nothing in the political world that Charlie can’t analyze, clarify or explain. Which is good news, because we’ve got plenty to cover: On the Republican side: Are votes enough? Donald Trump keeps winning them, but do they translate into enough delegates? If not, then what? For Democrats, can Hillary Clinton finally start her victory lap? And assuming she wins the nomination, has she been pulled too far left – How does she translate her message for more centrist general election voters?

Taegan Goddard: The Outcomes Look Bleak for Republicans

The candidates may be riding the subway in New York. Perhaps they’re thinking about Pennsylvania – Even California. But all political eyes are on Cleveland. While polls show Donald Trump crushing in the Big Apple, Ted Cruz was the Big Cheese in Wisconsin. Cruz’ double-digit win there significantly increased the chances of a contested Republican Convention. 538’s panel of experts estimates Trump will fall short of the magic 1,237 delegates. As The University of Virginia Center for Politics told the New York Times: “The chances of a contested convention just went up.” It’s no surprise that the frontrunners say a wide-open, no-holds-barred contested convention would devastate the Republican Party; delegitimize the entire primary process; silence the precious voice of primary voters. It would bring disaster. But would it? Or instead at this point, might a contested convention be exactly the thing Republicans should hope for? Taegan Goddard, as we all know, runs Taegan Goddard’s Political Wire. He spends the totality of his waking hours and many of his sleeping ones scouring political news of the day.

Rick Shenkman: What Your Brain Really Thinks About Donald Trump

Many of us look at this extraordinary, ridiculous, seemingly-unprecedented political season and wonder: How is this possible? The anger perhaps we understand. The feeling that the system is so corrupted that the only effective approach will be to kick over the table and figure out later how to rebuild it? Even those who don’t agree the problem is that dire can get their heads around the idea. But fear-mongering, name-calling, locker-room-talk-mimicking as the path the White House? What is going on? According to historian Rick Shenkman, the answer just may be science. And evolution – or, perhaps more accurately, a lack of evolution and the way our natural instincts are helpful for, say, avoiding sharks in the ocean, but unhelpful when it comes to sharks of the political kind. Shenkman is the New York Times best selling Author of ”Political Animals: How Our Stone-Age Brain Gets in the Way of Smart Politics.” Shenkman uses science to explain why so many of us are susceptible to politicians’ manipulations – and why so many don’t seem to care. Shenkman is also Editor & Founder of the History News Network.

Mark Blumenthal: What Do Americans Really Think About Politics?

Chris Riback speaks with pollster Mark Blumenthal on what we know about the 2016 presidential election.

For answers to a Presidential campaign that few predicted and fewer, perhaps, pretend to understand, we often turn to the dark science of polling. Given the overwhelming amount of data each of us generates each day – from clicks to searches to surveys and more – the people who tell us what we think and feel have taken an important if not outsized role in American society generally and American politics specifically. Among our big questions:

• Is this nasty campaign an accurate reflection of who we are as a country?
• What do American’s really want in our next leader?
• And if it does end up to be Clinton vs. Trump, who wins an election where both candidates are disliked in such intense ways by so many?

Complicated issues, which is why Mark Blumenthal is here to help us understand. Mark is Head of Election Polling for SurveyMonkey and runs their NBC News|SurveyMonkey Weekly Election Tracking poll. He, of course, is the original Mystery Pollster, and was co-founder of Pollster.com and previously served as Senior Polling Editor at The Huffington Post. He has worked for dozens of Democratic candidates running for office at various government levels.

Taegan Goddard: The Party No Longer Decides

Chris Riback and Taegan Goddard discuss the how Donald Trump's campaign not only broke the Republican party but broke political science.

What in the world is going on? We are well into a primary season with results few of us expected, headed straight to a general election that even fewer dare to predict. All of us – and certainly both major political parties – are in unchartered territory. For Democrats, their new location at least appears to be on a pre-existing map. For Republicans, their new map reveals a planet they never knew existed – a place that frequently shows little signs of gravity – and I mean both definitions of the word, with its lack of seriousness alongside a certain amount of weightlessness. This place is a foreign territory – there’s no huge wall to keep us out. It’s a place where the leading candidate and possible nominee is hated by the party establishment, actively running against the Party – and Party ideology – he hopes to represent. Yet this new planet may be exactly where the future of politics is headed. A place where the direct connection between candidate and voter has changed – and governs – everything. So how did we get here? More importantly, where are we going? To kick off our season and help us find answers, there’s no one better than my friend and Political Wire’s namesake, Taegan Goddard.

Former Virginia Gov. Jim Gilmore

With the elections finally behind us, our focus turns the hard work of governing – and the big question of what, if anything, will get done?With Republicans controlling Congress and a lame duck Democrat who’s surely thinking about his legacy in the White House, what will give? Or are we about to see gridlock so extreme that the last few years will look incredibly productive in comparison?It won’t take long to find out. With the President’s Executive Order to remake Immigration in America – and with Republican vows to override – the first battle is on. What’s next? Where are we headed? And is it all really just about 2016?To help us understand: Jim Gilmore, Founder of Growth PAC. Of course, among many other roles, he’s also former Attorney General and Governor of Virginia and former chair of the Republican National Committee…

David King, Harvard Kennedy School

Midterms 2014 are just around the corner, and for Repubicans it seems the voting can’t come soon enough. State by state, poll by poll, the GOP appears to pick up steam by the day. They can taste Senate control.Are the appearances true? Might there even be a Republican wave? Which key races – in the Senate and the House – should we make sure to watch?David King is Senior Lecturer in Public Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. He directed the Task Force on Election Administration for the National Commission on Election Reform following the 2000 presidential elections and recently hosted a conversation on the upcoming Midterms…

Larry Sabato, Center for Politics at the University of Virginia

It’s almost time – Election Day 2014, Midterm style is less than two weeks away. We can see the finish line from here – unless, that is, the finish line gets moved.With Republicans seeming more and more likely to take Senate control, could this election instead go into overtime? With possible runoffs in Georgia and Louisiana, recounts in close races, vote count challenges in states like Alaska, decisions by independent candidates on who they will caucus with…  Could control of the Senate hang in the balance until January?To know the answer for sure, you’d really need a crystal ball… which, of course, is just what we have for you today.Larry Sabato is University of Virginia Professor of Politics and director of their Center for Politics. He is also Editor in Chief of Sabato’s Crystal Ball, the must-read, detailed analysis for elections across the country…

Charlie Cook, The Cook Political Report

We’re proud to have as our guest today – our sponsor, Charlie Cook, Editor and Publisher of the Cook Political Report and Columnist for the National Journal.Few follow the ins and outs of political campaigns more closely than Cook and his team of reporters and editors. And with less than three weeks to go before the new "most important election of our lifetimes," they’re tracking all the key races and trends – in particular, who will take control of the U.S. Senate.

Stan Greenberg, Democratic pollster

With less than a month to go, the question that’s been at the center of the midterm elections continues to be the big unknown: Who will take control of the Senate.We know that stats: 36 races are on the ballots; to takeover control, Republicans need a net gain of 6. And the closer we get, the more the contest seems to be coming down to just 4 or 5 key states.As listeners of this podcast know, most predictions show probabilities leaning toward a Republican win. Of course, a few notable exceptions exist.And now a new one: the Women’s Voices Women’s Vote Action Fund and Democracy Corp teamed up to look at the Senate races. Their finding: For the first time in this election cycle, movement across a “range of indicators that suggest the Democrats are more likely to hold control of the U.S. Senate than not.”The survey was conducted by Stan Greenberg, longtime Democratic pollster, Polling adviser to President Bill Clinton, Al Gore and Nelson Mandela, among many others; CEO of Greenberg Quinlan Rosner and Co-Founder Democracy Corps.