HeyJaredThe Friday Reporter
The Friday Reporter was created to better understand the news process from a journalist's point of view. After nearly three years, the guest list has expanded to include newsmakers, policymakers and image makers.
- Indexed episodes, last 90 days
- 7
- Latest publication
- Sep 4, 2026
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- Checking…
- Earliest in this view
- Jul 10, 2026
Latest episodes
Not Yet a Sure Thing (opens the original)
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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 t
What Jessica Taylor Hears That Others Don’t (opens the original)
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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 o
Nonpartisan in a Partisan World (opens the original)
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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 tr
The Ratings Are Not Scripture (opens the original)
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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 Po
The Fight for The House (opens the original)
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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 t
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