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 think these stories should all be connected to each other. The rage and frustration over Iran is basically rage and frustration over his political situation, because the former is causing the latter. He’s in a political bind that we don’t think we’ve ever seen before.
Christina Reynolds: Thanks for having me.
Harry Enten (voiceover): Inflation net approval minus 50 points or worse. Fifty points underwater or worse. Total polls per president. Trump in 2026—already eight polls, already at least eight polls in which his net approval rating on inflation or the cost of living is negative 50 points or worse. Every other president in every other year, the answer is zero.
Reynolds: I don’t think it was this bad. And I worked at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in ‘06, and we took back the House. And Bush was certainly not a popular president at that time. But these are numbers that I would send back to the pollster and say, can you double-check? I don’t know that I’ve seen numbers this bad.
Not that I think they would be able to shift the conversation. When inflation is growing higher than your wages, voters understand that. They know it. They live it. And so you can’t convince them things are better when they’re literally not. But Trump is not just going to go out and talk about things and remind voters of that—he’s going to go out and talk about his ballroom. He’s going to go out and talk about the reflecting pool, as he did in Wisconsin when he went to one of the most vulnerable Republicans. So this is a huge problem for Republicans. It’s not just the polling number, it’s what Trump’s going to do because of the polling number.
Since everything has to always be about his lionization, his glorious greatness, he just says, I don’t care about inflation, or affordability’s a hoax. There’s no sensitivity or awareness of the situation the rest of his party is in, in any sense.
I mean, you heard it in the “I don’t care about the midterms” comment. You hear it in everything that he does. And my guess, if I was a Republican, I would want him to take a back seat on things outside of maybe fundraising. And he’s doing the exact opposite. And so if you’re a Republican and you’re forced to stand up there and praise him for gold-plating the White House, that’s a pretty tough campaign ask.
Reynolds: No, me neither. It’s pretty impressive when you think about it. It also is a sign that you can’t pull the wool over voters’ eyes on things like this. Everyone goes to the gas station. Everyone has to deal with the prices going up because of gas prices.
Sargent: It’s really extraordinary. So all this is key context for what’s coming next. CNN’s Dana Bash reports that sources are saying Trump is, quote-unquote, “furious.” Why? Because after Trump struck Iran this week, the media didn’t view his action as powerful enough. Dana Bash also reports that Trump is frustrated that Iran didn’t seem to be taking the strike seriously. Amazing.
The reason Trump is angry isn’t just because Iran won’t do his bidding. It’s that by not doing Trump’s bidding and keeping the Strait of Hormuz closed, Iran has him cornered. It’s driving up prices, destroying his numbers, and destroying GOP midterm hopes. The anger and the polling are connected in that sense, right, Christina?
He is just clinically unable to move on because of that rage and that frustration, because it didn’t go the way he assumed it would go. And so we are stuck in a war that people didn’t ask for, that we proactively started. But we are domestically stuck with higher gas prices and everything that stems from that.
Sargent: Yeah, I think that’s exactly right. He’s in a rage because the media is portraying him as being fundamentally ineffective and unable to resolve the very situation that’s creating the high prices.
As someone who’s worked on midterm elections, how do you anticipate the impact of this playing out on the ground in all these races over the next few months? What’s it going to look like politically?
But they see it’s not working. And where we have candidates that are out there talking about issues that matter versus a candidate that is forced to talk about a ballroom or to praise a war that they’re not that into, you’re going to continue to see voters give a chance to those candidates.
And maybe I can offer something different, or I can connect better with my community. And that means we see some interesting candidates out there who offer something different. Different is good in a change electorate.
They have not done their constituent services, they have not gone out and had a tough campaign schedule, versus a candidate that’s new, that’s trying again, that has the fire in their belly. And I can tell you which candidate I’d rather work for every time in that scenario.
They’re trying to expand the House map by really going into some very difficult districts traditionally for Democrats—ones that lean Republican by four or five, six, seven, eight, that kind of thing. And some of these are in North Carolina, some of them are in central Pennsylvania, some are in Iowa.
Reynolds: You expand the field at a time like this because we look at what’s happened since Trump got elected. Since Trump got elected, Democrats have flipped 30 state legislative seats, Republicans have flipped none. Democrats have overperformed in the elections that have happened—a variety of special elections, state legislative elections. Democrats have overperformed in 85 percent of those seats. That number in 2006 was about two-thirds. So we’re overperforming all over the place.
And so I think you’re going to see this more and more where organizations, where campaigns expand out, and we’re going to pick up some of those seats. Because the Republicans also have to try and expand their map. And I don’t—they’re not ready for that. They don’t have the message for that, to actually reach and connect with voters.
Now the polling averages have it a little tighter—at 50PlusOne, they have it at six points, the average is 49 to 43. But this 10-point poll makes me think that the average could start to widen as well. And if Democrats are up at seven, eight, nine points, you’re looking at a wave.
Reynolds: I am usually a pragmatist, maybe a pessimist. But I think this is going to be a wave election. I think we spend a lot of time talking about a very few candidates. And so we miss some of the amazing candidates who are running in races down the ballot.
And so I feel like between the environment, between the precedent, and between what Trump’s going to be able to do and how little they are going to be able to control that, and how much they’re going to have to walk with him off that cliff—I feel good about where Democrats are.
That’s part of how he won: was communicating with voters and telling them he understood. And now he has moved on to ballrooms, to wars they didn’t ask for, and to these price increases don’t matter.
Reynolds: House candidates, state legislative candidates, in some cases gubernatorial candidates. They don’t get as much attention as usually U.S. Senate candidates, but there’s some really great candidates out there doing great work. And I think that’s going to make a difference too.
I want to flag something else from the Emerson poll. In the generic House ballot matchup, Democrats are leading the GOP among independents by 15, 45 to 30. Now, how important are independents in midterm elections? And what do you make of that number?
Reynolds: Yeah, I think that’s exactly it. I think that number is huge and hugely important. More and more people are finding themselves unaffiliated. They are deciding, maybe I’m not connected to either party. Some of this is the divisiveness, some of this is the way we paint both sides. Count me as someone who—I don’t love where the Democratic Party brand is right now. But I’m not as worried about it because I think each candidate is running their own race on Democratic values, and I think those values are incredibly popular. And that’s why we’re appealing to independents right now.
Reynolds: Lots of things. We never know what’s going to happen in the world. We never know how things are going to change and what voters exactly are going to care about. Will there be massive world events? Will there be natural disasters and things like that? All of which just throw a campaign off its axis a little bit. And so we never know that.
And so I feel good about that. I think we keep laying the groundwork, we keep supporting those candidates. And I think—gosh, I’m not usually an optimistic person, Greg—but I feel like we’re doing what we need to do, and voters understand where the world is right now and that they need change.
Reynolds: It does. It very much does.
Reynolds: You too. Thanks so much.
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