Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
So what’s the real nature of the connection between those protests and Trump’s plummeting approval numbers? The answer to that will give us a sense of what it all means for the fall elections. So we’re talking today to Leah Greenberg, a co-founder of Indivisible, the group that organized those protests, about what to make of what’s going on out there in the country. Leah, nice to have you on.
Sargent: So Leah, what’s the final estimate on the turnout at the protests over the weekend? And by the way, congrats.
Sargent: Well, I really want to come back to that because his erosion in red America and with the base is an important thing. So the New York Times polling averages have Trump at 39 percent approval with 56 percent disapproving. Nate Silver’s polling averages have him at 39.6 percent. And the 50 Plus One website has Trump even lower at 37 percent approval to 58 percent disapproval. Leah, all three of those are below 40 percent. And it’s really worth stressing that these are averages which are deliberately constructed to not move quickly. What do you make of that milestone?
And I should also add, particularly in the last month, what we’re seeing is that the war is driving a new set of folks out and activating people in a different way. Because fundamentally, people are still getting used to the fact that this is a real and full and escalated war. But they’re reacting very clearly to that.
Harry Enten (voiceover): This has been a steady fall into the abyss. There is no bottom. Death Valley. If there’s one big number from this, is that Donald Trump now has the worst net approval rating among independents of any president ever at this point in term two. He is worse than Richard Nixon, who would be going adios amigos in a few months back in 1974 in term two. Look at this, minus 45 points, worse than George W. Bush at this point in term two. The Iraq war was weighing him down at minus 37 and worse than Richard Nixon when of course there were all those impeachment hearings back in 1974 at minus 36 points. He’s nearly 10 points worse among independents on his net approval rating at this point in term two, Donald Trump is, than Richard Nixon. My goodness gracious.
Greenberg: Well, I think when you look at the Trump coalition of 2024, it was a coalition of everyone who was dissatisfied with the status quo. And that is an inherently unstable coalition at the best of times. And it is an especially unstable coalition if you make really clear that your top priorities are a mass deportation agenda that generates blowback pretty much everywhere it goes, an unpopular catastrophic war that nobody asked for, your own enrichment and your prerogatives, putting your signature on the dollar instead of doing anything that’s useful for folks, and massive tax cuts for wealthy people.
Sargent: And the abuses of power are obviously central. I mean, no kings, right?
So, the first No Kings was energized by the deployment of the National Guard to Los Angeles. The second one was a reaction to the administration’s massive encroachments on free speech in the wake of the Charlie Kirk assassination. This one, we saw a huge animation around ICE, the secret police, around the war. What we’re seeing collectively is that people come for a lot of reasons, but they can hold up that shared sense that we’re all under attack and we’re all facing the same imperious, unaccountable governance that is harmful to us.
Now it’s clear, though, that the war in Iran is a big driver of all this protest energy. Elliott Morris’s analysis of Iran polls found that it’s like the least popular war at the outset of any U.S. war in memory. That wasn’t at all assured, was it? What do you make of that? Like, how did that happen? And what are you seeing on that?
I think there were a lot of people who did not immediately have a massive reaction to it because they experienced it as one of many different episodes of saber rattling aggression. But as it has become clear that this is a massive generational catastrophe and one that’s going to have immediate implications for Americans as well as being catastrophic for thousands of innocent lives lost abroad so far, people have really been starting to rev up and starting to make the connections between the international and the domestic agenda.
Sargent: Leah, I want to go back to what you were saying about the base and about the turnout in some red areas. We had this extraordinary Fox News poll the other day. I want to run some of the findings by you because it sort of provides a little bit of an indication of why you might be seeing that.
Greenberg: Yeah, I think that’s absolutely the case. Look, I think that there was a door that was left open by the disastrous Biden administration policies on Gaza for Trump to portray himself as the anti-war candidate in 2024. I think many people, including folks like the Uncommitted Movement, recognized at the time and tried to avert a situation where Trump was able to do that.
And I think, more generally, I would say there is a sort of unhelpful tendency in the Democratic consultant class to think about talking about economic issues and everything else as a binary where if you’re not talking about affordability, then you’re not breaking through to voters on affordability.
Sargent: The other thing that drives me absolutely crazy about that sort of Democratic consultant class brain lock is that it just doesn’t reckon with how information works in the Trump era. It’s all about attention. It’s all about what Trump is doing. I mean, that’s the bottom line, right? Like, our politics is about Donald Trump a lot of the time. Believe me, I wish that weren’t so, but it is. He commands the attention. He’s the one driving very powerful emotions among people, especially negative ones. And Democrats need to accept that speaking to those emotions is an essential part of the project, right?
And so the basic assumption that you can rely on some kind of media vehicle to carry your message to the voters the way that a newspaper used to if you were getting called for comment—that’s not true anymore. You actually have to get attention. You have to be in the fight. You have to engage with the news of the day if you want people to hear you at all.
So that was just absolutely disproven in real time. We saw a tremendous amount of citizen involvement in these things. And critically, a lot of it went viral on social with these incredible videos, which just happened to have a lot of attention-grabbing drama to them. And the Democrats who started speaking to the feelings unleashed by that stuff really broke through. And breaking through—you have to break through, right?
Sargent: Absolutely. And so I think in a way none of this was assured, and I want to ask you about this. I’ve been arguing at NewRepublic.com that Trump has thrown away the traditional GOP advantage on three of the party’s recent strengths—the economy, immigration, and national security. That’s an extraordinary thing, but it was not necessarily predictable. At the outset of Trump’s second term—and I’m sure you noticed this too—there was a big sense among the punditry that Trump’s victory was bigger than it actually was, that he was a strong and formidable figure who had correctly grasped the deeper yearnings of the American people.
Greenberg: So I would say, first of all, I think there was always an over-calibration, particularly in how elite quarters understood the 2024 election. I remember talking to reporters in November and December of 2024 and their frame was: the resistance is over, Donald Trump has won this resounding victory, there’s no real possibility that there’s going to be any kind of repeated backlash the way that there was in the first term.
And part of the theory originally with No Kings was actually, let’s figure out a way to visibilize the fact that American society—elite institutions might have folded to Donald Trump, but American society really hasn’t. And that there is opposition in so many more places than you might expect. That was really the original core of why we did the first No Kings—was trying to bring that current out.
I also think, frankly, the press consistently has this tendency to think of Republicans as the voice of the real people, the voice of the real Americans, et cetera, et cetera. And so that was just doubly in play in a way that was frustrating and easily disproven at the time if people were paying attention, but not that many people were.
And so they were just way too quick to over-read Trump’s win as this kind of deep and profound cultural referendum on the left and on wokeness and in favor of quote-unquote populist conservatism or whatever they like to call it. Is that more or less what you’re saying? And can you talk a little more about it?
And instead they got Trump of 2025 and Project 2025 and Stephen Miller—a bunch of people who came in very intentionally and very determined to use every power they had to the max, to penalize every outside institution that could challenge them and to collectively remake American society. They had an ambitious plan that they started putting into action immediately. And that fostered and galvanized a backlash much faster than a lot of people would have expected.
What’s your sense of how all this energy on the ground and these low approval numbers will convert into gains in the House and Senate? What has to happen to ensure that it does convert on the scale we’re hoping for? How good are you feeling about things?
What is a big threat is—because Donald Trump knows this too—we have every reason to believe he is going to try to sabotage the election six ways from Friday. He has already been putting into action his gerrymandering plan. He has already been putting into action his mid-decade redistricting to gerrymander as many seats as he can. He has already been attempting various executive orders to shift around voting parameters. He will continue to try a bunch of dirty tricks to suppress the vote, to manipulate the process of voting in elections—key elections—to subvert the count.
Sargent: Leah, I guess there are two sets of signals we’re getting, just to kind of close this out now. One is that the maps are not quite as good as we’d like them to be. So the House map is not sort of riddled with as many competitive seats—or obviously superficially and on the surface competitive seats—as say the 2018 map was. So that’s leading some Democrats to trim their sails a little about the predictions. The Senate map is very hard for Democrats. So that’s also leading some Democrats to trim their sails a little.
Greenberg: 100 percent. I’m saying wherever you are, you should be working towards the biggest turnout you can because we don’t know where we’re going to get lucky. But I would bet that in November we’re going to see some real surprises in some pretty red places.
Greenberg: Thank you.
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