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When Rob Ott and I were in college, we had to sign into the computer lab just to set up an email address. No cell phones. No inbox in your pocket. And everyone told us there wouldn’t be any jobs when we graduated. Thirty years later we’re still friends. Our kids are hearing the same warning. Rob is an executive coach now. Before that he built a career in cancer research and ran business operations in the corporate world. He left that role and went looking for what came next right as ChatGPT hit its inflection point in 2022. He saw it early. The technology would move as fast as it moves. The people would be slower. That’s the heart of his new book, The Relevance Advantage. It starts with a fear social scientists now have a name for. FOBO. The fear of becoming obsolete. You know the feeling. You built a career. You put years into a set of skills. Now a machine does some of it faster, better and cheaper. Rob doesn’t argue with that, and I love that he doesn’t. Most AI books sell you the tool or sell you the panic. Rob concedes the speed, then points to what the machine can’t touch. If you’re mid- or late-career, you’re sitting on the answer. Judgment. Experience. Wisdom. That’s why I reached out to him. I run my business with Claude as a systems operator. It keeps my invoices moving and my CRM current. Nobody hires me for that. They hire me for 30 years of judgment. Rob calls it a moat. What’s inside is yours. Everything outside is fair game for the tools. His framework, TRUST, is built for the people who freeze. Target where you’re going. Recognize what’s resisting you. Undertake small experiments instead of jumping in at step 17. Steady yourself through the messy middle. Transform. The part that stays with me is the one he’s still working out. Kids coming out of college were told the tools were cheating. Now they’re walking into offices where nobody knows how to teach them. How do you build judgment when the reps that used to build it are gone? He doesn’t have that answer yet. He’s writing toward it. In the meantime, he’s coaching an 80-year-old solar engineer on AI. The man is flying. The Relevance Advantage is in presale right now. Rob is my friend, and this is the book I wish every one of my clients had on their desk. Support it here: books.manuscripts.com/product/the-relevance-advantage Key Quotes “It feels like this machine can do what I do faster, better, cheaper. And I think that that’s true, and I’m not going to refute that.” — Rob Ott “A lot of people with AI will jump in at step 17 and say, oh my God, what is this? And they’ll get freaked out and close the computer and walk away.” — Rob Ott “When you commoditize intelligence, it changes the way you’re going to build that judgment.” — Rob Ott Takeaway Speed was never what they hired you for. Judgment was. Get full access to Lisa Camooso Miller at newsletter.fridayreporter.com/subscribe

Behind Darren Samuelsohn on our call sat a plastic tub. Then another one. Inside are about 200 journals, decades of a reporter writing to himself, and he’s working his way through every one of them. Darren and I go back years. Energy, then politics. He was the reporter and I was the flack, and we’ve both changed our shade a few times since. In late 2022, one of those journal entries saved him. His team at Insider had just won an SPJ award for Conflicted Congress, its investigation into members trading stocks. Washington is still arguing about that story. Then he was fired. He told me it sucked. He also told me it was the most he’d ever talked about it. So he wrote. An essay called “Why I Love Journalism,” trying to talk himself into staying in the business. Somewhere along the way it flipped into a letter from journalism back to him. Love, Journalism. Comma in the middle. That’s his Substack now. He didn’t leave the newsroom right away. He went back in twice, to The Messenger and then USA Today, where he led White House, Congress and campaign coverage through the stretch all of us lived through. Earlier this year he walked out. His tank was empty, and had been for a lot longer than he let himself admit. He’s clear-eyed about the business he came back to. The outlets that are thriving, from a one-man courts beat on Substack to the Times and the Post, know exactly who they’re talking to. He worries about where that leads, with everyone gravitating to their own churches. He also sees a living in it for journalists willing to experiment and fail. He’s failed before. He learned from every one. What struck me is how much fun he’s having. A weekly podcast. Photographs of power lines out his car window. Poetry. A Bigfoot story he swears is coming. At 12, Darren wanted to be Dave Barry. Now he has the column, and Dave Barry is on Substack too. I asked how he knows when it’s time to go. His grandfather admired people who talked about ideas, he said. So Darren checks whether he’s still learning something about himself, the world or the business he loves. At Insider and again at USA Today, the answer stopped being yes. He says a lot of what he writes now is for the reporters he used to edit. A little inspiration. A nudge along the way. Consider this one passed along. Notable Quotes “And then I got fired. And man, I’ll just say it. It sucked.” — Darren Samuelsohn “I think the tank was empty two or three years before it was empty.” — Darren Samuelsohn “Everyone’s kind of gravitating to their own churches, and that’s dangerous as well as a bounty and an opportunity for journalists who want to write.” — Darren Samuelsohn Takeaway Sometimes the love letter to the work only gets written after the work lets you go. Get full access to Lisa Camooso Miller at newsletter.fridayreporter.com/subscribe

The full write-up of this conversation lives on my website: The Vibes Can Tell You a Lot: What the Ground Game Sees In 2004, Jon Seaton went door to door for Bush-Cheney with a clipboard. Can the president count on your support? Great. I can get you a yard sign. There were never enough yard signs. Somewhere in Arlington there are probably still boxes of those sheets, every answer written in pen. Jon and I came up together in Bush world — him in the field, me on the communications side. He went on to run John McCain’s national field program, advise Lindsey Graham and launch Echo Canyon Consulting, named Best New Firm at this year’s Reed Awards. This week he came on The Friday Reporter to compare notes, four weeks out from the midterms. The clipboard is gone. It all happens on a phone now, and a campaign knows more about a voter before the knock than we used to learn after it. Jon gives Karl Rove the credit. Rove decided grassroots could be measured like money raised or quotes in the paper: doors knocked, voters reached, events attended, every single day. That idea built the modern campaign. It also built every corporate and issue campaign in Washington that actually works. So you’d expect a guy who sells canvassing data to swear by the numbers. He doesn’t, entirely. Jon isn’t anti-analytics, but politics is a people business, and no forecaster can stand in 50 congressional districts at once. He reads Google Trends. He watches the national environment. Then he gets out to Phoenix or Texas, sits down at a restaurant and talks to whoever is next to him. Everybody jokes about the vibes, he told me. The vibes can tell you a lot. What he hears out there isn’t what Washington is chasing. Not one person in Phoenix has brought up the White House ballroom with him. They want to afford groceries and gas. The campaigns that miss it are the ones that are entirely too online, chasing the outrage of the day because it feels like catnip. His fix is almost too simple. Take Twitter off your phone and listen. I’ve worked the last four weeks of a race the same way for years. I don’t listen to Washington. I call my friends outside the Beltway. On Election Day, Jon sends one tweet: What are you hearing? Then he waits like the rest of us, with the whole thing finally in the voters’ hands. Notable Quotes “They joke about the vibes, but the vibes can tell you a lot.” — Jon Seaton “I don’t know one person in Phoenix, Arizona that cares about what the Kennedy Center is called.” — Jon Seaton “You can question their judgment. You shouldn’t question their motives.” — Jon Seaton, on what he learned from John McCain Takeaway The data tells a campaign which door to knock on. The person who answers tells it what’s actually going on. Four weeks out, Jon Seaton is still listening for both. Get full access to Lisa Camooso Miller at newsletter.fridayreporter.com/subscribe

For 25 years I wrote words that weren’t my own. At the Department of Commerce, in the Speaker’s office, at the RNC, for elected officials and whoever else I worked for. That’s the job. The best communicators are the ones you never see. Alethia Jackson calls it being the whisperer. When she invited me onto The Power Within, her podcast about power, influence and modern leadership, I got to be the one answering the questions for a change. This week The Friday Reporter is sharing that conversation. Alethia founded The Ultimate Power Play, a community of women leaders across health care, finance, technology, government and culture. She opens every interview the same way: how do you define power? Where I landed is that power is the ability to move something. A person, a decision, a conversation. Not the biggest title or the longest résumé. The ability to read a room and then act on what you see. I believe the quietest person in the room is often the most powerful one, and I spent most of my career being that person on purpose. Noise gets clicks. The people who sit back and take stock are the ones who actually move things. But staying quiet for a client is strategy. Staying quiet about your own point of view is something else. At 53 I finally have enough confidence (and enough gray hair) to share mine. When you’ve spent a career advancing other people’s voices, finding room for your own feels almost uncomfortable. Alethia knows the feeling. Early in her career she would sit in meetings and hold back a point, figuring someone else would make it. A mentor told her that what she was thinking had value. She was in that room to take up time and space. Someone else will say it, sure. Nobody else will say it from your experience. Imposter syndrome might be the most overused phrase of 2026, and there’s a reason it’s everywhere. Since I started Authentically Speaking, colleagues have told me it gave them the courage to share their own points of view. That’s the part that keeps me writing. We closed on legacy. Lately I’ve been running elevator pitch trainings, teaching everyone from the front desk to the C-suite to say who they are, what they do and why it matters in the ride from the first floor to the third. It seems small. It’s the same lesson I had to learn myself. On the way out, Alethia said people who help others communicate give them power and voice. I spent 25 years giving mine away. It turns out you’re allowed to keep some. Listen to my conversation with Alethia Jackson on this week’s Friday Reporter: [EPISODE LINK]. Find The Power Within wherever you get your podcasts and The Ultimate Power Play at powerplayseries.org. Pull Quotes “I spent 25 years writing the words that were not my own… I now feel like I have enough confidence and enough gray hair to share my own unique point of view.” — Lisa Camooso Miller “I’m there to take time and space and to have that voice.” — Alethia Jackson “People who help others communicate give them power and they give them voice.” — Alethia Jackson Takeaway Spend a career giving other people their voice and you earn the right to use your own. Get full access to Lisa Camooso Miller at newsletter.fridayreporter.com/subscribe

The morning after the 2016 election, Katie Harbath sat at a red light on Constitution Avenue in a daze. She had gotten home around 3 a.m. and fallen asleep on the couch in her clothes, CNN still on. She didn’t know exactly what was coming for Facebook. She knew something was. That’s where her new book opens. Katie ran Facebook’s global elections work for a decade, through 2016, Cambridge Analytica and the congressional hearings that followed. This week she came back to The Friday Reporter for a second conversation, this time about Disrupting Politics: A Front Row Seat to the Collision of Technology and Democracy, out October 6. She didn’t hedge on why she wrote it. People know the Zuckerberg and Sandberg version. Almost nobody knows what the people in the trenches lived through day to day. She wanted that on the record, in her words. Katie and I came up the same way. Campaigns first, an analog world, then a digital one. I was at the RNC when she was, and we all wanted the same thing: a president talking directly to voters online. For fifteen years that was the goal. Then it felt like everything changed overnight. Washington and Silicon Valley are still two bubbles that bump into each other now and then. These days she’s in DC explaining what a prompt is, the same way she once explained a news feed. Anyone who watched Mark Zuckerberg tell a senator “we sell ads” remembers what that gap costs. You’d expect someone who lived through that backlash to come out of it cynical about AI. Katie didn’t. Her mantra is panic responsibly: weigh what’s in front of you, make the best call you can and be willing to pivot. Congress probably won’t move before 2029. The states already are. And election officials, from the Secretaries of State to Democracy Works, are sitting down with AI companies right now on how chatbots answer where, when and how to vote. She wishes it had started six months ago. It started. Every time I get breathless about technology, I hear Katie in my head. She ended on something bigger than tech companies or Congress. We choose our platforms. We choose what we read and what we share. That sends a signal on its own. Fifty years from now historians will write about this stretch. Katie made sure her story is in the pile. The rest of us are writing ours every time we hit share. Preorder Disrupting Politics here: [LINK] Notable Quotes * “I didn’t want anyone else telling me my story.” * “The best thing you can do is weigh the options in front of you right now. Make the best decision you can, and then be willing to pivot based upon what you learn from that.” * “We can control what content we are consuming, and we can think about what content we are sharing.” Takeaway The problem isn’t panic. It’s freezing up. Twenty-five years at the collision of tech and politics taught Katie Harbath to make the call, stay ready to change it and never forget the citizen has a say too. Watch here — Get full access to Lisa Camooso Miller at newsletter.fridayreporter.com/subscribe

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. Get full access to Lisa Camooso Miller at newsletter.fridayreporter.com/subscribe

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! Get full access to Lisa Camooso Miller at newsletter.fridayreporter.com/subscribe

I was serving as Special Assistant to Acting Governor Donald T. DiFrancesco then — his traveling aide, at his side almost every day. Some days that meant Drumthwacket, the Governor’s residence. Some days it meant the Statehouse. Some days I’d start at his home in Scotch Plains instead. You didn’t know which until you knew. That morning it was Drumthwacket. I parked and walked into the command center to find the troopers on detail that day, the way I did most mornings. One of them was racing out as I came in — his father was in one of the towers. A plane had hit, that much everyone knew. That early we thought it was small, contained, and an accident. I walked through the side door into Drumthwacket and saw the televisions on in the troopers’ offices, and that was the moment I knew. This is not what I had in mind for today. The Governor himself was further inside, in the parlor, with a group of Holocaust survivors the state was hosting for breakfast, deeply engaged in a room you don’t want to interrupt. But reports were coming in that the National Mall was on fire, that this wasn’t contained to one place and we had to get to State Police headquarters. What I remember most about those first hours isn’t a fact. It’s the fear — deep and gut-level. I was twenty-six years old, and for most of that day I wouldn’t let Rae Hutton, the Governor’s press secretary, out of my sight. I needed an adult in the room, even though by then I was supposed to be one. The reporters wanted the same thing from us. What do you know? What can you tell us? It sounded like a question about facts, but really it was a search for reassurance, for some sense that someone, somewhere, had an answer. That day was the first time in my life I understood that the adults did not always have the answers. There was no way to check on the people I loved either. My boyfriend at the time — now my husband — and my sister were both in Washington. None of the calls were going through. The troopers and I had two-way pagers, a little texting, nothing more. No BlackBerrys, no iPhones. You sat and watched broadcast news, and that was the whole of what you knew, professionally and personally, at once. I had friends at the Port Authority. Several were running late that morning and never made it in. I think about that luck often. Others weren’t as fortunate — New Jersey lost more than seven hundred people that day. I still remind people of this: we were closer to Manhattan than Albany was. We were on the ground before the Governor of New York even arrived. One woman on the Governor’s staff lost her brother in the towers. I went with the Governor and the troopers to his funeral. I have never once heard bagpipes since without feeling that day in my bones. Later that day, before any of the funerals, the Governor prepared to board a Black Hawk for Liberty State Park. He turned to me first. “Not today, Lisa. I do not know what we will see. Today, I would like you to stay here and stay safe.” He was the one flying toward it. I was the one told to wait. Twenty-five years later, I’m still not sure which of us had the harder job. Debbie Baker went with him — the same trooper who’d first told him a plane had hit. When she came back, she had a blank look on her face. I asked her what she saw. “There was nobody there,” she said. That night I drove myself home, alone on roads that should have had other cars on them and didn’t. I have never been more frightened in my life. I got home, turned the television on, and didn’t turn it off. I don’t think I slept. The next day, we went into the city by boat — the Holland Tunnel was closed, so boat was the only way in. What I saw at the site looked like a war zone, except it wasn’t a war, and everyone there knew it. Hundreds of people moving in near silence, still searching for anyone who might be alive. I sat in the biggest rooms and the saddest ones after that — meetings with Mayor Giuliani and Governor Pataki, watching men try to make decisions about a catastrophe no one had a playbook for. I remember Giuliani pushing to get government buildings back open — something close to we need to show them they can’t win — and someone telling him, gently, that the work wasn’t done. Not cleanup. Preservation. It was still a recovery site. I watched medical students give their time to identification work with no clean edges to it. I walked past telephone poles covered in photographs — faces, names, phone numbers, taped up by people who hadn’t stopped looking yet. There was a smell in the air for weeks I have never been able to describe to anyone who wasn’t there. I will never forget any of it — the rooms, the poles, the smell, the quiet next to the loudest grief I’ve ever been near. I can’t believe it’s been twenty-five years. Those memories are seared into me in a way almost nothing else from my life is. That day is the reason I moved to Washington. I wanted to be part of whatever the solution turned out to be — to protect this country, the people I loved, the children I hadn’t had yet and the children they’d go on to have. That’s the call underneath everything I’ve done since. That day didn’t just define me. It defined a nation. I asked the Governor this week what he remembers most, twenty-five years on. Not the chaos. Not the decisions. The people who ran toward it. “Even people who weren’t working that day, who went up into those towers to help,” he told me, “and who perished because they were going up while everyone else was coming down.” Tomorrow, like most every year, he’ll be at Ground Zero for the service, standing in the quiet while they read the names. Twenty-five years ago, he told me to stay behind. Tomorrow, he goes back. Get full access to Lisa Camooso Miller at newsletter.fridayreporter.com/subscribe

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. Get full access to Lisa Camooso Miller at newsletter.fridayreporter.com/subscribe

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. Get full access to Lisa Camooso Miller at newsletter.fridayreporter.com/subscribe

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. Get full access to Lisa Camooso Miller at newsletter.fridayreporter.com/subscribe

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. Get full access to Lisa Camooso Miller at newsletter.fridayreporter.com/subscribe

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. Get full access to Lisa Camooso Miller at newsletter.fridayreporter.com/subscribe

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. Authentically Speaking is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a subscriber. Get full access to Lisa Camooso Miller at newsletter.fridayreporter.com/subscribe

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. Get full access to Lisa Camooso Miller at newsletter.fridayreporter.com/subscribe