Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
G. Elliott Morris, who runs the Strength in Numbers Substack, has been arguing for some time that Trump’s numbers are much worse than our mainstream discourse allows. So we’re talking to him about all this today. Elliott, always good to have you on.
Sargent: So let’s start with this new Fox News poll. It has Trump’s approval on the economy at 34 percent of voters nationally, with 66 percent disapproving—I’ll do the math, that’s two thirds disapproving. His approval on inflation is even worse. It’s at 28 percent with 72 percent disapproving, which is almost three quarters. Elliott, can you put that in context for us? How bad are those numbers?
Donald Trump hit minus 32 in this polling today. That’s the net rating for his approval on the economy. So if you’re getting lost in the numbers, I think that’s some really useful context. Donald Trump’s numbers on the economy—the thing that he won the 2024 election on—are as bad as Joe Biden’s were during the peak inflation crisis of 2022 and 2023.
Morris: Yeah, and this is kind of the same thing, right? Donald Trump won the 2024 election on getting prices down and getting the economy moving after COVID. Okay, arguably it was already doing that, but let’s just grant him that that’s why he won. He’s at minus 44 on this in the Fox News survey on net. In my polling, he’s at minus 46.
Sargent: Well, we’re going to talk about that in a second, but there’s a real kill shot in the Fox poll. It finds that Democrats are favored over Republicans on the economy for the first time since 2010. Fifty-two percent pick Democrats and 48 percent pick Republicans. And on prices, again, it’s even worse—54 percent favor Democrats versus 46 percent who favor Republicans.
Morris: Greg, I looked up the Republican and Democratic Party’s numbers on the economy for 2024. These numbers come from Gallup. Gallup found that on the question of which party was “better able to keep America prosperous”—I know, slightly different than who do you trust on the economy, but that’s the question wording they use—the Republican Party had a six-percentage-point advantage going into the 2024 election.
Sargent: I do want to talk about your Verasight poll because it showed something similar in a bigger sense too. You found that the Republican Party is now more disliked than the Democratic Party is. The Democrats are at 45 percent approval to 48 percent disapproval—not great, but pretty close to parity maybe. But the Republican Party is at 39 percent approval to 55 percent disapproval. And I thought, fascinating number from your poll—Democrats are 11 points ahead of Republicans on who looks out for the middle class.
Morris: Yeah, that’s what I see. There was a lot of hand-wringing about the 2024 election after the fact and why Kamala Harris lost to Donald Trump. And a lot of the—let’s just call it the strategist class, I guess, Greg—was talking a lot about how the Democrats were too left-leaning on this social issue or that economic proposal or what have you. But actually what the political science says, and what our polling said at the time, was that voters were just really upset at the ruling party about prices, about the daily cost of normal economic life in America.
Sargent: Yeah, and this is not unimportant. I really want to underscore that. The entire pundit class and the entire strategist class—with some exceptions, but basically that whole group of people—over-read the significance of Trump’s 2024 win. And I don’t think there’s been any real accountability or admission of that fact.
Morris: Yeah, but Greg, he only won by a point and a half. I mean, the guy won by three times less of a margin than Joe Biden did. He barely won the swing states as well—he won Pennsylvania by what, a point and a half? We were writing this at the time. This was not like the big electoral victory for MAGA Trumpism that he wanted the media to believe.
Well, I don’t even think that these advisors can count on that. They can’t count on Republicans necessarily holding a trust advantage over the Democrats at this point, can they?
So unless the Trump White House and the RNC have some plan for materially changing opinion about what issues people say are most important to them, over-indexing on stuff where Republicans have a trust advantage on immigration and border security just is not a solution to their current problems. Their problem right now is that the American people don’t trust the Republican Party to handle their most important issues—period, full stop. Over-indexing on things that aren’t the most important issue is not going to change that.
Morris: The House, I think, is probably a foregone conclusion for the Democrats, if I’m being honest with you, Greg. I mean, the generic ballot in our survey is D+7. There’s a pretty predictable historical pattern where the party out of power gains ground as the midterms go along—so the party out of power is the Democrats, and we should expect them to gain at least a couple of points in the generic ballot over the next couple of months.
Like, the average swing in a midterm normally, without a president at 20 percent on prices, is for that party to lose 26 seats in the House. With a president at a 35, 36 percent approval rating, that loss of seats goes up to closer to 35, 36. This is a level of political gravity that the Republican Party is not, in any conceivable electoral simulation, going to be able to dig itself out of. I would put this at like 95, 96 percent chance. I’m almost sure Democrats will take the House.
Morris: Our average at 50 Plus One has Democrats up five and a half points right now.
Morris: Yeah, I expect that number to increase. But even if it was just +5, we’re still talking about Democrats flipping, you know, 10, 15 seats, which is more than they need. They just need two or three.
Trump looks like he’s in a pretty foul mood these days. And I’ve got to think a lot of these numbers that they’re looking at privately as well as publicly explain that. We are seeing people start to drop out of the administration as well. I expect that to continue. Is that the sort of thing that can help, though? It sort of seems like that’s not really going to do much.
We’ve been seeing all these special elections when you just have the high-likelihood turnout voters show up, but those are Democrats winning by 15 points on average better than Kamala Harris did. So that’s not going to fly.
So not to be too morbid—I just don’t think that that’s a workable strategy. And the fact that they’re throwing out all these different ideas about how they might win, different things they could try, just throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks—that shows that they really acknowledge the depth of the problem that they have.
And in your poll, 55 percent support impeaching Trump, kind of coincidentally. So this is really a very clear situation where a solid majority of the country just doesn’t think this guy should be in the White House, shouldn’t be in the Oval Office, is not fit for the job, is just fucking it up and needs to go. Isn’t that sort of the basic size of it at bottom?
And this has been day after day coverage that the Trump administration is giving freely. They do press conferences about this, drawing attention to these unpopular policies. If you do that over and over again for 14 or 16 months, whatever it’s been, and you’re like the public face of all these negative policies, there’s going to be backlash against that. That’s really what we should expect.
Is that low enough to make the Senate gettable for Democrats? What’s your reading on that? Where does Trump have to be approval-wise to get to four seats, which Democrats need to net? These are very tough races—they’re running in some very hard states. What’s your sense of it? Where does Trump have to be for Democrats to win the Senate?
So add a couple points onto that—that means maybe D+10, D+9, they are favored to win the Senate. Today in our survey, they’re at D+7. On average, they’re at D+5. So imagine that Democrats gain a couple of points before the midterms—then they’re on the precipice of taking back the Senate on average. Donald Trump is at 37 percent approval in our average today. So if he gets down to 35, 34, you’re at the point where Democrats are taking back the Senate. And that is very plausible.
Morris: Thanks very much, Greg.
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