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.

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.

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 —

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.