The News
The Cook Political Report, which has tracked the gritty day-to-day of politics for four decades, will put its entire archive online tomorrow, offering a remarkable and nonpartisan window into modern American political history.
Charlie Cook launched the publication in 1984 as a simply-printed tipsheet covering political campaigns, and it grew into a irregularly-mailed bound periodical before going digital in 2002. It’s now a solid digital business, with 8 employees and some 70,000 subscribers (face value for a year’s subscription is $350), owned and operated by Cook’s protégée Amy Walter and her wife, Kathryn Hamm.
The archive “tells a pretty good story about the evolution of our politics,” said Walter, a Sunday show regular who is also a political analyst for PBS NewsHour. “There’s nothing else out there like this.”
The archive offers a unique contemporaneous introduction to the figures who would go on to shape the United States, from Joe Biden to Mitch McConnell. (Of the latter, Cook wrote in 1979 that the Republican was a “tough fighter” who would nonetheless be tested by Kentucky’s “Democratic tilt.”)
Ben’s view
Even through the lens of detailed campaign journalism that focuses on partisan combat, the steady march of American politics toward polarization is evident.
“We didn’t question whether Congress was going to be basically functional, or the idea that you would be boasting more about things that you didn’t do than things that you did do — that part feels new,” said Walter.
As they were scanning the archive in, for instance, a young staffer noted to Walter a story in which a senator had endorsed a colleague from the opposite party in his own state.
“You didn’t campaign against your home-state colleague,” Walter explained. “That was considered so inappropriate.”