Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
We’re parsing through all of it with Grant Wiles, the VP of data and polling at NextGen America, the youth mobilization group, which has its own polling showing that Trump has completely lost the culture. Grant, good to have you on.
Sargent: So Trump was at Madison Square Garden on Monday night. He was loudly booed twice. Here’s what the second one sounded like.
Sargent: And here’s what Trump had to say afterward about his reception.
Sargent: OK, Grant, numerous news accounts said he was booed. The Times called them “loud and raucous boos.” The Washington Post described “loud jeers.” The AP said he was “booed loudly.” But to Trump it was great. Your reaction to all this?
He’s gone from somebody who prided himself on his ability to have successful friends who he can brag about, to a situation where nobody wants to really be affiliated with him.
Then Fox’s Brian Kilmeade said that it was “mixed.” “There were people cheering,” he said. And he blamed the boos on the security.
What do you make of that? I think really what this means, Grant, is that Fox News really understands on a very visceral level that the escalating perceptions of Trump’s unpopularity are themselves deadly for him. What do you think?
Any number of things can happen to somebody who fails to prop up that delusion and maintain it really delicately for our president. But the reality is American people aren’t so easily deluded anymore. They know who he is.
I think maybe Fox and Friends, which is the morning show that I just quoted from, really does try to puff up Trump, maybe in a way that the polling outlet at Fox News does not. So that schism is itself kind of interesting. You know what I mean?
Sargent: So let’s get into some of the new polling that’s just out. It’s really bad for Trump. The new Economist/YouGov tracking poll has Trump’s overall approval at 35 percent of Americans versus 60 percent who disapprove. That’s 25 points underwater. His approval on the economy is 29 percent to 63 percent disapproving. On inflation, it’s 24 percent to 68 percent.
Wiles: Yeah, I think it’s important to note at the same time that just because he’s down doesn’t mean we should take this for granted. Last cycle we saw billions of dollars being poured into a PR campaign to support him and prop him up. And the normalization of Trump happened at every level of the ballot, where people felt like, maybe he’s a businessman, the economy is an issue, we should potentially trust this person.
Sargent: Just to build on what you’re saying a little bit, there’s tremendous institutional investment in propping up Trump, basically. Fox News is an enormous organization. It’s an enormous propaganda outlet. There’s going to be hundreds and hundreds of millions spent, maybe a billion dollars, by outside groups between now and election day, trying to push up those numbers, trying to take the edge off his disapproval.
Wiles: Yeah. And more importantly, I think Trump and Republicans have seen how unpopular they are, and they’re laying the groundwork to actually rig these elections through voter suppression—the SAVE Act, the newest version of the SAVE Act. The Supreme Court ripping up the Voting Rights Act and the power of Black voters, and through redistricting and gerrymandering. To them, voter participation itself is an act of resistance.
Sargent: I think it’s worth just saying here that this effort to suppress the vote of young people is really telling in one sense. The inroads that Donald Trump made with young voters in 2024 was one of his big success stories. It was one of the Republican Party’s bigger public opinion and political success stories of the last couple of decades.
And so now they’re at the point where they’re coming up with new ways to suppress the vote of young people. And Trump is furiously raging at Republicans, demanding that they pass this voter suppression thing in time to save them for the midterms. That alone is a big story and tells us a lot.
Granted, there are the least gains among the youngest parts of the electorate, specifically the 18 to 22 range, but there are massive gains in the 23 to 29, 30 to 34 ranges. And we’re seeing that reflected across the space.
A new Reuters survey also has Trump’s approval at 35 percent. The New York Times average of polls, which is pretty conservative and takes in a lot of data, has him at 38 percent. That’s really bad, especially for a polling average. He’s probably in the mid-thirties. He’s now, at the very least, firmly in the thirties, right?
We just conducted focus groups and young people were saying just how difficult life has been from an economic standpoint and just culturally. One person said, Trump ruined my high school years, ruined my college years, and now is ruining the rest of my twenties.
Sargent: Well, I’ll tell you—what I think you’re getting at there is the degree to which Trump is this kind of malevolent, destructive force in American life at this point. And I want to close on that. First, I just want to talk about an interesting new poll from The Argument Substack. What they did is look at Trump’s net approval state by state.
Wiles: Yeah. I mean, Republicans are in the really unfortunate situation of having to defend the president’s record while him himself not being on the ballot. We’ve seen that he often is the driving force of a lot of new Republican voters to the polls. But when he’s not on the ballot, like we saw in 2018 and 2022, the Republicans that are have to deal with the consequences and defending his horrible record.
This is not a pipe dream. Texas is very much in play this year, and this is a real election with a strong candidate. And Trump decided to intervene at the last second to put Paxton up. And being someone from Texas, I think that’s a horrible idea. They’re going to regret this decision.
Now, nobody’s going to pretend here that Texas is easy. A shit ton of stuff can still go wrong. It’s an incredibly hard state to win. But I think it’s probably worth focusing a little bit on what you just said, which is that if Texas is going to be winnable, it’s because of Trump in two ways.
Wiles: Yeah, and you also have a candidate who’s even more unpopular than Trump, believe it or not. Ken Paxton has a very low approval rating. He has a million issues as a candidate. And that’s even before you take into account that he’s on the hook for defending Trump’s record.
Sargent: OK, well, I want to close on this point that you made earlier. NextGen America, your group, recently released some research. I want to focus on one of your findings, which was that you found highly negative views of Trump as a person and as a cultural phenomenon, with many discussing Trump as someone who’s really wrecked our political and social life. Can you describe those findings?
Wiles: Yeah, one of the most striking takeaways I had from that focus group that we just ran with Tulchin Research—they were Bernie’s pollster in 2020, a really highly respected pollster in the space—we found that Trump’s brand is so damaged compared to the last time we talked to young people.
And in both the groups we ran, for young men and young women, they were asked for gut reactions to Trump. They offered up words like horrible, infuriating, predatory, criminal, an egotistical loser, con man, cult leader. The list goes on. But there was pretty much uniform agreement that he’s had a really negative effect both on the culture of this country and on the policies that affect their daily lives, specifically regarding the economy.
Yet at the same time, because of the structural ways in which midterm elections work, his increasing toxicity, his increasing unpopularity, his disastrous policies are weighing down on the party in power, because in midterms, what happens is voters turn out against the party in power. And so it’s like a two-layered effect here of Trump toxicity, in a way, isn’t it?
But we’re not taking anything for granted. We want to make sure that people are equipped to vote, they know how to vote, their rights are protected, and that very harmful legislation like the SAVE Act never gets passed.
Wiles: Thanks for having me.
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