Full Episode - Could Democrats Actually Win 270+ House Seats? + Wargaming An American Coup

Chuck Todd opens with the Wall Street Journal's brutal profile of Scott Bessent — built on 30-plus interviews describing outbursts, a thrown briefing book he denies, and seven Senate-confirmed officials out the door when previous administrations lost zero to two. The 3-3-3 plan never materialized, the debt cleared $40 trillion, and Trump keeps giving him more. Chuck's read: the whole Cabinet has become mini-Trumps. He then gets into whoever's drip-releasing the Paxton tapes, Pritzker's $1 million check to Gina Hinojosa, and Mike Rogers breaking with Trump on Canada far too late. Finally, Chuck runs the historical numbers on whether Democrats can actually win six-plus Senate seats — with Iowa and Kansas as the real test of the wave theory and whether we’re not seeing a political realignment occurring in real time that could result in Democrats winning 270+ house seats.

Then, Dmitri Mehlhorn — Democratic strategist, Atoll Society co-founder, and author of the new novel Archipelago of Light — joins the Chuck ToddCast to walk through the war games he runs simulating a contested 2028 election. Three teams: Institutionalists, Nationalists, and Capitalists. The Nationalists win a lot of them, and the mechanics are grimly instructive — they pump up progressives to generate backlash, offer carrots and sticks to capital, and find that every norm broken makes the next break easier. Mehlhorn argues the midterms are the rehearsal: get voters accustomed to challenging results now, delegitimize the process before 2028, and exploit a speaker's latitude not to seat delegations if things are close. His core warning is that our biggest failure has been a failure of imagination — and that taking power back has to be the singular issue in 2028.

Finally, he answers listeners’ questions in the Ask Chuck segment and previews the upcoming weekend in college football.

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