Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Lakshya Jain: Thanks for having me, Greg.
Lakshya, your polling at The Argument has the generic ballot matchup at Democrats plus six: 53 to 47 points. What’s your view of the data right now? Can you run us through what’s out there?
It’s important to say here, Greg, that the Republicans have been known for their strength on the economy in the eyes of the voters. This is a Republican issue. Economics to Republicans is what healthcare is to Democrats—it’s a traditional issue that is in their corner. And Trump is so deeply underwater on cost of living that it’s not even funny.
Jain: Yeah, well, Greg, great question. I think if you look at our polling data—I can actually pull this from our latest poll—we are finding that Trump is 14 points underwater with people who rank “cost of living” as their top priority in the next election. And this is important to say: This is very ahistoric for Republicans. They are not used to getting clobbered on the economy.
Sargent: And that’s the generic House ballot matchup, right? So in the House elections right now nationally, among voters who are concerned about cost of living, Democrats are up three.
Sargent: Yeah, that’s pretty topsy-turvy. I just want to switch to Donald Trump exploding on Truth Social for a second. He unleashed this wild, “epic” rant a few days ago, but he’s now pinned it to the top of his feed. I’m going to read from it:
Trump then says he has some sort of executive order on this coming—who the hell knows what he’s talking about—and then rages against “Corrupt and Deranged Democrats” Democrats and predicts they will do all sorts of terrible things if they get back into power. Then he rages that Dems are “demented and evil” people who want to “knowingly and happily destroy” the country.
Jain: The last election that happened—if everyone had voted, Trump would have won by more. The Republicans are not understanding that by putting requirements like requiring passports or whatever, they’re just making the voter pool more and more Democratic.
Now, here’s where it ties into today. Basically, over the last few years, Trump has made consistent and sustained gains up until the last presidential election among these types of voters: poor people. At the same time, Democrats are gaining with rich people. Rich people are more likely to have the forms of ID that the Republicans are requiring in their newest bills. These things are all things Democrats are more likely to have now because Democrats are richer. Republicans are basically making it harder for their own voters to vote.
But if I understand you correctly, Lakshya, you’re suggesting that Trump is basically operating from an out-of-date conception of what benefits him and the Republican Party, right?
And so the Republican SAVE Act basically says you need to have either a passport or, like, a driver’s license and a birth certificate, whatever. These forms of documentation—whether you have them or not—just strongly correlate with how much money you have. So now imagine that you’re “chopping off” the poor end of the voting pool. That’s going to end up just helping Democrats by default.
Sargent: That’s really, really interesting. He essentially is operating from a model in which the disengaged voter pool is the Democratic one and the engaged voter pool is the Republican one. And you’re pointing out that that’s flipped on its head. And I guess in a midterm election as well, it’s even more flipped on its head, right? Because the hyper-engaged voters who are paying really close attention and really care deeply about politics—those are the ones who vote in midterms, and they’re Democratic-skewing. Is that the basic size of it?
This is one of those things where I don’t think people quite realize how different the issue environment looks when you start looking at people who make a lot of money. So Greg, among people making $200,000 or more, Democrats led by 12 in our last poll. And among people making between 50 and 100K, that lead was down to 5 percent.
A new Reuters poll has Trump’s approval on immigration down at 38 percent. That mirrors a recent Associated Press poll, which also had it at 38 percent. That, to me, is really striking. It’s not that Democrats are winning this election by running on healthcare—although that’s important—it’s actually that Republicans are crippled on the very issues where they’re supposed to be strong: the economy and immigration. And that’s highly unusual. Can you talk about that?
And up until, like, November of last year, you could have clearly and fairly said that immigration was, at best, a neutral issue for Democrats. Right now, it is a place where Democrats have a clear edge. And now, the question is: What is immigration like now? We know that Trump had an advantage last election. What is it now?
Sargent: That is absolutely crazy. That is just so striking. And this gives me an opportunity to raise something that you often hear out there, which is: Well, okay, Trump’s approval on immigration is upside down, but it’s really just a reaction to ICE tactics and brutality. It’s not actually a reaction to real policy or anything like that.
But Lakshya, does that matter in a midterm? Isn’t the thing that matters the most in a midterm the impressions of the president? That to me, I think, really essentially wipes away whatever people are saying about Democrats in some fundamental sense. What do you think of all that?
Sargent: So can you talk about why presidential approval is such a dominant thing in midterms, and why that’s more important than issue impressions of the challenging party?
That’s why the president gets rewarded for a good economy; that’s why the president gets punished for a bad economy. That’s why the president gets rewarded for calm—and gets punished for [chaos]—and the president’s party gets penalized or rewarded accordingly.
Sargent: Yeah, that is such an essential point. So let’s just wrap this up. What’s striking to me about all this is that Trump’s 2024 win was driven in part by his success on immigration, his success on the economy, and his success among disengaged voters. A lot of analysts thought that these were permanent shifts—or quasi-permanent shifts, really seismic things—but it’s turning out that they weren’t.
Jain: I think if you had to take a guess at what the environment would be, something very, very similar to what we had in 2018. And I would expect that a lot of this is going to be driven entirely by self-inflicted wounds from the Republican Party, because things did not need to get this chaotic and things did not need to get this bad with tariffs and immigration. It’s their own fault.
Sargent: Well, Lakshya Jain, that is an extraordinary picture of where we are, and it happened very quickly. Thanks so much for coming on with us, man. We really appreciate it.
Jain: Thanks, Greg.
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