When Chuck Todd gets time off from grilling our nation’s leaders as moderator of Meet the Press and offering sharp political analysis for NBC News, he doesn’t exactly take it easy. He heads to the grocery store. Multiple grocery stores, actually.
“Honestly, my favorite thing to do is, on my day off, I just go to four different grocery stores I’m obsessed with,” he admits, somewhat sheepishly. “During the pandemic, like a lot of people, I got into cooking more. I end up trolling a lot of different markets, whether it’s Mom’s, Harris Teeter, Balducci’s — that’s my guilty pleasure.” (The fourth store, for the record, is Trader Joe’s.)
We caught up with Todd, who’s also the political director for NBC News, at the Meet the Press studio near the Capitol to talk about the midterm elections, politics in Northern Virginia, and what life in Arlington is like for him and his family.
Todd has been at the helm of Meet the Press since 2014. One wall in the studio’s workspace is lined with historic photos of the important figures who have appeared on the show with Todd, his legendary predecessor Tim Russert, and those who came before them. The public affairs show, which celebrates its 75th anniversary in November, is the longest-running program on television.
“My joke on that is that you just don’t want to be the last [moderator],” Todd says. “But that fact I always find a little bit intimidating. It’s not just the longest-running TV show in news. It’s the longest-running TV show, period. … We’re all custodians here.”
New Spaces
The current studio, completed just before the pandemic started, still feels new to Todd, who used to broadcast from NBC’s bureau on Nebraska Avenue in Tenleytown. The new place is a slightly longer early-Sunday-morning commute from his home near Chain Bridge — about 20 minutes versus the previous seven minutes, he says. But he’s not complaining.
He recalls watching when the ground-floor space was being constructed, and workers lifted the entire building to raise the ceilings and move a structural column. There are a lot of members of the media located at this address, which enjoys stunning views of the Capitol building. Todd remembers thinking, ‘Boy, if this doesn’t work, there’s only like 17 news organizations that will cover the story.’”
The finished space features pillars with journalistic values engraved on them, including accuracy, tenacity, courage, freedom, truth, and trust. When we met there in late August, it was the day primary elections were held in Florida and New York. The studio was buzzing and other familiar NBC News faces like White House correspondent Kristen Welker and senior Washington correspondent Hallie Jackson were on the air. (Welker was set to join Todd in a one-hour special about the election results streaming on NBC News NOW, the network’s free streaming platform, later that evening.)
Todd was the first to expand on the Meet the Press brand, making it a daily show on MSNBC. Now, the franchise’s daily spinoff, Meet the Press NOW, is on NBC News NOW. “Meet the Press stands for something, whether it’s Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday,” Todd says. And with the numbers of viewers using streaming services rapidly increasing, he’s excited to bring the show to that platform. “I just want to go where people are going,” he says.
“By moving our daily show to streaming, the longest-running TV show in history is now primarily a digital brand, meeting more of our audience where it is — on digital platforms,” says Carrie Budoff Brown, senior vice president of Meet the Press. “Chuck is incredibly entrepreneurial and that energy and creativity is a huge reason why the Meet the Press brand has expanded as much as it has over the last eight years.”
The political whiz is hitting the road in September and October to cover battleground states ahead of the pivotal midterm elections, heading to Arizona, Nevada, Wisconsin, Georgia, and Pennsylvania. Todd says he sees this year’s election as more like a “mini presidential” race than a typical midterm, with groups of voters motivated by the Supreme Court ruling on abortion, the state of democracy, the economy, and immigration policy. He finds that voters are almost evenly divided amongst those issues as their motivating factors.
“I think it’s a more difficult midterm to cover, and a lot of political reporters are trying hard to take the midterm and fit it into a bucket that we previously had, and I think that’s a mistake,” he says.
As for going out to meet voters, Budoff Brown says there’s no substitute for it. “Spending as much time as possible outside Washington is simply essential when it comes to midterm election coverage,” she says. “And Chuck thrives on reporting from the field, particularly talking with voters.”
Heading North
Todd, 50, grew up in Miami and first came to the DC area to attend George Washington University, where he double-majored in music and political science, and later shifted to a music minor. (He at first attended with a scholarship thanks to his talent in playing the French horn.)
During his senior year at GW, he moved out of the District and into an apartment in Ballston. “I remember being sold on it immediately for one reason: Car insurance was half the price it was in DC,” he says. “And they plow the roads! … There’s this weird thing that people have in DC about the bridge. The bridge. That somehow Maryland’s closer to DC than Virginia is … There’s this perception [that it is closer] because you don’t have to cross a body of water.”
Despite a couple of short stints living in DC, Todd has lived in Arlington for the majority of the time since then. His wife, Kristian, is a political strategist and teaches a course in political communications at Columbia University every other semester. They have two children: Their 15-year-old son is in high school, and their daughter is a freshman in college in Todd’s hometown of Miami.
He is struck by how he came to DC from Miami for college, and then brought his daughter from the DC area to Miami for her to attend college. “So I have to admit that there is symmetry,” he says. When we talked, he was just getting adjusted to his daughter being away. He says he’s touched (and surprised) that she shared her schedule with him, so with a quick check of his phone, he knows what class she’s in or when she’s going to the gym — something he’s quick to admit he never would have shared with his mom when he was in school. “I’ve been sadder about [her being away] than I expected,” he says. “I’ve not wanted her to know I’m sad because she gets very emotional quicker.”
The family really bonded during the pandemic, with everyone spending most of their time at home together. (Like many TV personalities, Todd even broadcast from home.) “We became closer — and I never thought we weren’t close,” he says. “I feel like I’ve gotten to know my kids as young adults.” As a silver lining during a difficult time, he’s grateful to have had the opportunity to be more present in his kids’ lives, he says.
A Growing Region
Living in Arlington for more than 25 years, Todd has seen a lot of changes, especially on Wilson and Clarendon boulevards, which were once home to many used car lots but have since been developed into prime locations for retailers, restaurants, and residences. And there always seems to be a new restaurant popping up that he hasn’t tried yet, he says. “That used to not be a thing.”
He’s also watched the entire Northern Virginia region expand during his time living here. “Northern Virginia is now encroaching on Richmond, right?” Todd jokes. He reflects on how, when he first moved to the DMV in the early 1990s, Fairfax County was one of the “swingiest” counties in the country. “It was just very competitive,” he says.
“Fairfax County is the county that’s changed the most quickly, I would argue, when you look at it over the 30 years that I’ve been here,” he says. “I mean, it was a swing county, and [now] it is a blue county.” He says Fairfax is now arguably the single most important county in the mid-Atlantic to the Democratic Party. “It can help decide [an election], depending if [the Democrat party] gets the number [of votes] that they need out of it. … I’m trying to think of another county that has this much influence on their vote, it’s hard to find one in a competitive state.”
And now, there’s a new purple county on his radar. “Loudoun is the new swing, right?” he says. “My point is that the growth of the Northern Virginia suburbs, the expansion of the Northern Virginia suburbs, is astonishing.”
Why has the county and the NoVA region expanded so much, in his view? He looks to the defense and tech industries. “This is where Virginia had the better tax structure than Maryland did, and so businesses chose to have their regional or their Washington headquarters” in Northern Virginia, he says.
He also weighs in on the outsized amount of national attention that the Commonwealth gets, given that it’s a “light blue” state on the political map, has off-cycle gubernatorial elections, and its governors can’t serve a second consecutive term.
“We produce governors here all the time since we don’t let them run for reelection,” he says. “There have to be more living former governors in Virginia than in any other state.”
He questions whether that amount of tumult and the constant nationalized political narrative that it creates is good for the state. “Do we really want to constantly be agitated? Think about Northern Virginia, whose politics are always feeling nationalized,” he says.
What’s Next?
Much like Northern Virginia, Meet the Press may continue to expand, too. Todd, who likes to innovate, has helped diversify the brand’s content across broadcast, audio (in podcasts), newsletters, and now on streaming.
And now he’s thinking about what he might be able to do on TikTok. “I’ve got some staffers giving me a few thoughts on different ways we do it,” he says. “Whenever you do any of these things, you want it to be useful. You don’t want it to be just for narcissistic purposes.” Plus, he adds, he can’t embarrass his daughter.
This story originally ran in our October issue. For more stories like this, subscribe to our monthly magazine.