Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Amanda Litman: Thanks for having me, Greg.
Litman: People are pissed at Trump. He is not a good president. They do not like him. They do not like his policies around the economy. They do not like what is going on. They’re looking for any possible way to communicate that. And I think this election was a ripe opportunity to do so. But we’ve seen this in basically every election, both the specials and the generals throughout 2025. People are pissed, and they want to show it. Basically, every county where there was the election across Tennessee—it was a very gerrymandered district—it swung further blue by even just a couple points. That’s enough to move the margins—that 13-point swing from 2024.
Harry Enten (voiceover): Republicans should be running for the hills this morning because the blue wave is building, my dear friend Mr. Berman. What are we talking about here? Well, Van Epps—Matt Van Epps, the Republican candidate—he won it by nine. But this is a district that Donald Trump won by 22 points, 15 points, 17 points. This is a 13-point gain for the Democrats in terms of the margin, and excuse time for Republicans is over because I hear all about these special elections: “Oh, the turnout’s so low. It’s not representative of what happened in the midterm election.” The turnout last night in Tennessee’s 7th District was equal to the turnout in the 2022 midterm election. When a party outperformed in special elections since 2005—five out of five times—they went on to win a majority in the U.S. House of Representatives. What happened last night in Tennessee is a very, very bad omen for Republicans and a very, very good omen for Democrats.
Litman: Well, we saw both sides drop millions of dollars in this election, which feels pretty unusual for a special House race this year. I also think Aftyn Behn was a pretty exciting candidate, especially in some of the more urban areas across the district. And while Matt Van Epps is a pretty run-of-the-mill Republican, Trump’s association with him and the Republican Party’s association with him, I think, fires people up who want to send a message to them.
Litman: Fury about the economy, fury about cost of living. Trump promised to lower costs, to make groceries cheaper, make housing more affordable, and he’s done none of that. People are looking at these Black Friday sales and, you know, buying fewer goods for more money. They’re buying fewer Christmas presents at higher costs. That shit sucks. And I think that sort of frustration, both in urban and rural parts of Tennessee and across the country—it makes people want to show up and vote and to make their voice heard in whatever way they can.
President Donald Trump (voiceover): But the word affordability is a Democrat scam. They say it and then they go into the next subject and everyone thinks, they have lower prices. No, they have the worst inflation in the history of our country.
President Donald Trump (voiceover): Remember we had a great victory last night.
Litman: No, I think it portends a really crappy midterm for them. I played the audio earlier; it seems like they could lose upwards of 40 seats in the House based on the 2024 maps. And remember, we’re not likely to get the 2024 congressional maps in 2026. We’re going to get these new ones that they’ve been drawing across the country as they push forward this mid-decade redistricting. Some of those Trump-plus-20 districts have become Trump-plus-12 or Trump-plus-10. I think they have thoroughly owned themselves going into next year. Now, I also think Trump’s brain is just Jell-O coming out of his ears. He has no idea where he is or what’s happening. That man is so sleepy and so addled and so broken. And it’s a bummer, to put it lightly, that his sycophants can’t seem to stand up to him. Although I expect we will start to see more Republicans, both in Congress and across the country, breaking with him as they realize he is both politically toxic and a lame duck.
Litman: That’s absolutely right. To take a bunch of Trump-plus-20 districts and dilute them with formerly Harris-plus-15-type places, you’re going to have to make them a little bit less Republican. And in maybe a normal election they’d still be safe, but with a blue wave like we could see happening next year—and, I hope, good candidates who can really inspire voters to show up and make the case, particularly about affordability—I think they are straight-up screwed.
Litman: I think that’s going to be a huge problem for them. They’re going to be expanding their battlefield exponentially. Now, the flip is also true for the Democratic side. We’re going to be able to compete in places that we maybe haven’t before. I think that’s why it’s so important that Democrats have been really intentional about building deep benches all across the country. It’s what Run for Something has been doing for most of the last decade, in part because we know that where the competitive races could be will change. They’re going to blow a lot of money. Now, they have a lot of money to blow here, so I want to be mindful of that. They have never hurt for resources in this regard. But they aren’t going to be able to make every election as hyper-nationalized as the ones that we just saw in Tennessee.
Litman: I think you’re seeing the Republican Party begin to grapple with the fact that in a year or two, they’re going to have to redefine themselves post-Trump, and it’s going to be a wide-open race for who gets to lead that party forward. He has as much as said he’s not going to be on the ballot in 2028. He constitutionally is not allowed to be on the ballot in 2028. As the party tries to figure out who can hold together the Trump coalition—which I would argue nobody can hold together the Trump coalition—we’ve seen this over and over again. The crazy shit he says might work coming from him and his brand, but it does not work for nearly anyone else. No one has that charisma, whether you like it or not, and decades of life in the public eye to sort of make it stick with folks. They’re going to have to figure their shit out, and it’s going to be messy, it’s going to be expensive, and I’m just excited to eat the popcorn and watch the show.
Litman: I do. I also think it’s been interesting to watch some of the dynamics with Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House—how I believe there was yet another discharge petition that sort of circumvented his leadership and made its way to the House floor. He has no power. He is weak. Trump’s power is getting more and more limited by the week as his approval rating starts to plummet, especially with populations that he thought he had a stronghold on. He’s underwater with young people again, as he should have always been, but as he is once again. I think we are starting to see them really understand they have to begin to preemptively throw folks under the bus and separate themselves, or they’re going to get caught as the wave crashes.
Litman: Yeah. So Run for Something had about 144 wins in the November election. Forty-three of them were red-to-blue flips across 10 states; 70% were municipal races, 23% were school boards, 7% were state legislative. They were in districts as varied as Clarion County, Pennsylvania, where Trump won 70–30. And I’d say there’s a couple of trends we saw across those places. And these are candidates who had to win over Republicans and independents in order to win. One: affordable housing. Affordable housing, affordable housing, affordable housing. They’re talking about the need to lower the cost of housing. Two: they’re really flipping Republican-coded language on its head. They’re talking about fiscal responsibility and accountability and budgeting taxpayers’ dollars, support for public safety. One candidate really put it well: Prevention, preparation, and compassion, not fear. They’re talking about solutions, not grievances. I think that I found really interesting. And point number three is that 90% of our winning candidates in these red-to-blue flips explicitly talked about transparency and about bringing trust back into these institutions—about [how] they understand that people feel like they don’t know what’s happening with their money, with their government, that they really want to. So I think that was a really powerful thing that I hope to see more candidates glomming onto next year. We saw candidates who really loved the place they’re running and honored the place that they were running.
So I do think one of our tasks for the Democratic Party writ large is to make sure that the folks who can make the credible arguments, the state and local candidates, have as big of a megaphone as possible. And the final thing I would say about the red-to-blue flips that we had is that they were really listening to voters. They were listening, reflecting, responding—which feels like so fucking obvious to say, but... man, do a lot of candidates get it wrong. A lot of candidates are listening to consultants, not to voters; listening to focus groups, not the people they’re meeting on the streets. And I think it’s in part because they don’t have a good sense of self and a good sort of set of core values, but the candidates who do are really able to knock it out of the park in long-shot races.
Litman: There’s any number of things that keep me up at night. I think that we tend to win in spite of ourselves sometimes as a Democratic Party. I think there’s been a lot of delayed moving of money this year, if I’m being honest. There was some money moving to some of these special elections, but generally speaking, a lot of the year-round organizing, the kind of communications work, the media work, even the candidate recruitment work, like what Run for Something does… Money’s been slow. Donors have been sort of in choice paralysis or figuring out what they want to do next. They know that what we did yesterday isn’t going to work anymore, but they don’t know what we need to do tomorrow.
That’s where I think the state and local candidates will have the advantage. And, you know, we know that Trump is going to try and gaslight people. We learned with Biden, this doesn’t work. You can’t piss on someone’s leg and tell them it’s raining. You can’t. Send them to the grocery store and tell them No, no, the economy is good. Actually, you have to make sure that you’re really speaking to the way that they’re experiencing their finances. And Trump’s gonna try and undermine that; we’ve got to make sure they understand the truth.
Litman: I think they should talk about what their voters are talking about. They should really be listening to people about what’s on their mind. The thing we’ve heard from a lot of candidates out there knocking doors is like, yeah, they’re pissed at Trump, but really they’re pissed that their groceries are more expensive and their housing costs haven’t gone down. Yeah, they are pissed at Trump, but they’re also pissed that they have to carry whistles with them to scare ICE away from the daycare where it’s trying to kidnap kids. That really does speak to what voters are experiencing. How has this affected their day-to-day life? How has this administration hurt them? It’s not just that it’s lawlessness; it’s the lawlessness in service of what? So really making it personal, keeping it local, and not getting lost in the sauce, as it might be. We have a tendency, I think, to over-intellectualize or try and tell some bigger story. No, shit’s broken. Shit’s bad. We can fix it. We need your help, but we can fix this. Now, I think one of the challenges is that a lot of Democratic candidates maybe don’t have a story for how they want to fix it. They want to go back to the way things were before. That, I think, will not work. You cannot promise a return to the status quo. And that’s the real challenge for Democrats in 2026.
Litman: So I think it does, if that’s what voters are telling you they care about. I think that’s the thing that I would encourage every candidate that Run for Something works with to do is, like, listen to your neighbors. You know that. You know what’s on their minds. You know what they’re hearing. You know what they’re experiencing. In some places that might be ICE; in many places that might not be. You gotta know what your community needs to hear about, and you gotta reflect it back to them.
Litman: Well, I think Democrats are going to be able to take back the House if we run really great candidates, if we rally behind people who win the primary after the primaries are over, if we ensure that races stay localized, and if we ensure that every candidate in every organization has the resources they need to communicate and organize ahead of the November election. But I think it is going to be a great year for Democrats to run for office in all kinds of places, and I would encourage anyone listening to think about it because it’s not too late to get on the ballot for next year.
Litman: Anytime. Thank you.
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