Chuck’s Commentary - ALL The Election Indicators Favor Democrats + J.D. Vance Defends The Indefensible

Chuck Todd opens on the Wedgewood Polls scandal — a firm that admitted this week it fabricated its data as an “experiment,” after Mallory McMorrow says the fake numbers killed her Michigan Senate campaign. Chuck argues it’s worthy of a real investigation and that McMorrow should consider civil litigation. Then the main event: a NYT/Siena poll putting Democrats +11 on both the generic House and Senate ballots, with a clean sweep on issue favorability. At D+11, Chuck says Democrats net 40-50 House seats and win Ohio, Texas, Maine, Iowa and Alaska. The generational numbers are the ones that should terrify the GOP — only 15% of voters under 30 and 20% of millennials identify as Republican, and this electorate would have given Kamala Harris a 3-point win. Plus: Vance defending Ramaswamy’s Ohio ad on the grounds that all tactics are fair if you win.

Wall Street journalist William D. Cohan — author of the New York Times bestseller Money to Burn, on Leon Black and the rise of Apollo — joins the Chuck ToddCast to connect the dots between media consolidation, private equity, and the opaque corner of finance the ToddCast has been chasing since the Lakers special report. Cohan explains why Skydance needs CNN’s cash flow to service $80 billion in debt, why Trump may kill Nexstar’s bid for ABC out of spite toward Disney, and how a sports franchise purchase actually gets financed — including whether Mark Walter bought the Dodgers or insurance premiums did. On Black, Cohan had extensive access: Black maintains the hundreds of millions he paid Epstein were for tax and estate planning, and an investigation he commissioned found no nefarious activity, though Cohan is skeptical anyone pays that much for tax advice. His closing warning echoes Chuck’s: after 2008 regulators pushed risky assets outside the banks, and the new shadow banking system is barely regulated at all.

Chuck Todd argues corruption may be the Democrats’ best closing argument, drawing the 2006 parallel: the Mark Foley scandal gave Republican voters permission to vote against their own party, and tying the cost of living to a kleptocracy could do the same thing now. He’s bullish on the Senate, puts a blue tsunami at 15-20%, and points to Péter Magyar’s Hungary campaign as proof the corruption argument works. The Musk-Starshield reporting sharpens it — the richest man in the world appears to be shaping American foreign policy while funding Ken Paxton after every other donor walked away. Then Ohio: a video featuring Amy Acton’s estranged mother calling her a liar, from a woman who stayed married to the man Acton says raped her at twelve. Acton’s brother called it a despicable low; Ramaswamy’s campaign didn’t deny it and kept attacking her credibility.

Chuck Todd argues corruption may be the Democrats’ best closing argument, drawing the 2006 parallel: the Mark Foley scandal gave Republican voters permission to vote against their own party, and tying the cost of living to a kleptocracy could do the same thing now. He’s bullish on the Senate, puts a blue tsunami at 15-20%, and points to Péter Magyar’s Hungary campaign as proof the corruption argument works. The Musk-Starshield reporting sharpens it — the richest man in the world appears to be shaping American foreign policy while funding Ken Paxton after every other donor walked away. Then Ohio: a video featuring Amy Acton’s estranged mother calling her a liar, from a woman who stayed married to the man Acton says raped her at twelve. Acton’s brother called it a despicable low; Ramaswamy’s campaign didn’t deny it and kept attacking her credibility.

Stateline executive editor Scott Greenberger joins the Chuck ToddCast to argue for a founder most Americans have never heard of. In The Forsaken Founder, Greenberger makes the case that Gouverneur Morris has as strong a claim to writing the Constitution as Madison does — he was the best writer among the founders, the one who drafted the final text, and the one who stood up most forcefully against slavery, calling the three-fifths clause a fatal flaw and warning the country could not remain half slave and half free. So why is he forgotten? Partly because he never sought the presidency, partly because he rubbed people the wrong way, and partly because the Virginians who won the presidency wrote the history. Greenberger also wrote a biography of Chester A. Arthur, and he and Todd get into the forgotten eras of American politics, the Garfield counterfactual, and why you never know you’re living through a political era until it’s over.