Matthew Dowd and Jennifer Palmieri

Three weeks out from Election Day, John Heilemann kicks off the Hell & High Water Midterm Homestretch Scramble with Matthew Dowd, chief strategist on George W. Bush's 2004 and Arnold Schwarzenegger's 2006 reelection campaigns (and now a prominent #NeverTrumper), and Jennifer Palmieri, communications director for Barack Obama's White House from 2013 to 2015 and Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign (and now co-host of Showtime's The Circus alongside Heilemann). Heilemann, Dowd, and Palmieri discuss several of the key Senate races, all within the margin of error per current polling, that will likely determine which party controls the upper chamber in 2023: Herschel Walker v. John Warnock in Georgia, John Fetterman v. Dr Oz in Pennsylvania, Mandela Barnes v. Ron Johnson in Wisconsin, and Tim Ryan v. JD Vance in Ohio. They also discuss some intriguing gubernatorial contests — including in Arizona, where election-denier Kari Lake has momentum against Democrat Katie Hobbs, and in South Dakota, where Dowd believes MAGA darling Kristi Noem is more vulnerable than most realize -— as well as Trump’s subpoena from the 1/6 committee, Nancy Pelosi’s badassery during the attack on the Capitol, and the politics of weed.Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.