Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
But we still think there’s a long way to go, and a lot of things can go wrong. So we’re talking to Simon Rosenberg about how Democrats can close this deal, and whether all that GOP pessimism is really that justified. Simon, thanks for coming on.
Sargent: Good to see you, Simon. So Politico’s report is really striking. One GOP operative says they’re preparing for the bottom to fall out. That operative also says that Senate races are in play in Iowa, Alaska, and Ohio, and even that House districts that Trump carried by double digits are firmly in play.
Rosenberg: No, I think we have a shot here, right? I mean, it’s a year of opportunity for us. How well we seize it is really going to be in part up to us. They’ve created a situation where he’s already fallen very far, much further than where he was in 2018 at this point. The national climate is plus seven or so, or above, for us, which means that the House should flip. We have polls showing Sherrod Brown up—independent polls showing Sherrod Brown up in Ohio, and Mary Peltola up in Alaska, and Josh Turek up in Iowa. I mean, these are states that Trump won by more than ten points.
I’m a little torn over this. On the one hand, it’s not that hard to imagine him pulling out of the war in September and declaring victory, though he’d probably have to accept a fair amount of humiliation to do that, and he might not be willing to. And yet on the other, you hear things like this from Donald Trump.
Sargent: Simon, that’s really something. The new Washington Post poll finds 29 percent approve of Trump’s handling of the situation in Iran, with an extraordinary 69 percent disapproving. The contrast between him saying the war is popular and Republicans admitting the bottom is falling out over it is really something, isn’t it?
And that didn’t work, because Iran wasn’t playing ball with the perception that he was actually the victor. And they started asserting themselves in the Strait of Hormuz, which was an unacceptable situation for the United States and his regional partners. And so he’s now had to go back in and do what he did before, which didn’t work, which is bomb them, which was ineffective.
Sargent: One Republican operative told Politico about the war, “Nobody can really defend it.” The Post poll, by the way, says only 28 percent say the war was worth fighting, 68 percent say it wasn’t, and only 31 percent say what the U.S. is doing right now will prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon, while 66 percent are not confident of that.
Rosenberg: Well, and you could make the case that there’s similar data on the tariffs. So here’s Trump—prices are going back up, his standing is in the toilet, the Senate is in play now. And his tariffs are expiring. His temporary tariffs, his global tariffs, are expiring on Friday. And instead of letting them expire and saying, listen, I think it’s the right thing for the economy and the American people that I lower prices, he’s desperately slapping all sorts of new creative tariffs on the economies of the world, purposefully raising prices. He jacked up Brazil to 25 percent. He jacked up Canada to 50 percent.
Sargent: I want to underscore the importance of this, because I think it’s really lost on a lot of people. The tariffs are going to come back in a big way as we get closer to the midterms. And the tariffs are like the sleeper issue that really debilitated this president very badly in the first place. That’s what really started the inflationary stuff. And that’s when Donald Trump’s approval rating really started to unravel, particularly on the economy, over the tariffs.
Rosenberg: Well, let’s add a third thing that’s going to erode their position before the election, which is that both the private plans and the public health care plans—people are going to start getting notices of the premium increases. And what we’re seeing in the data is that even private plans are going to see significant cost increases, and that 50 percent of businesses have said in surveys that they’re going to pass those cost increases on to workers in their companies.
And then finally, you could add a fourth, which is we’re starting to get data that people are being pushed off of SNAP at a much higher rate than was anticipated. And so you’ve now got potentially tens of millions of people falling into greater food insecurity than was anticipated. And so all of these trend lines together add up to this basic reality, which is that Donald Trump and the Republicans have purposefully done extraordinary harm to the American people and to the United States itself in order to enrich themselves and their friends. And it is an extraordinary betrayal of the American people. People have figured it out.
Sargent: Simon, let me add yet another thing that I think is going to be working against them, which is that the ICE killings just started up.
Sargent: Right, right. I seriously—I mean, we got ICE just killed two people, one in Texas, one in Maine, where there’s a very competitive Senate race. We have a piece up at NewRepublic.com on the Senate race in Maine and how it’s going to be impacted by the ICE killing. Check that out, folks.
Rosenberg: Yeah. And I would just say to that—I mean, Tom Homan has been, for whatever reason, very vocal, very visible the last couple of days. And the guy is really a barbarian, right? I mean, the stuff he’s saying is so fundamentally illiberal and inhumane. He’s doing this, you know, like, hey, people wouldn’t get killed in the streets if they would follow law enforcement—meaning that he’s sort of sanctioning extrajudicial killing of Americans on our soil.
And so I agree with you, Greg. Listen, adding to what you just said about Maine—there’s almost no state in the country that gets punished more by Canadian tariffs than Maine. And so Susan Collins not only had this ICE killing last week, she’s now got to contend with Trump’s whimsical, punitive—for whatever reason, he got up and decided to punish Canada again, because it’s his battered wife, right? He’s now putting Susan Collins into another terrible position.
If you think about what’s happened in the Senate, Donald Trump hasn’t been helping the Senate Republicans. His major contribution to their reelection campaigns was to defeat two of them, as opposed to get them elected. So they don’t feel that he actually cares. I mean, he cares because he wants to protect himself from the hearings and everything else, but he’s not acting as if that is actually a priority for him, in partnering with the House and Senate Republicans to do things.
Sargent: OK, this is where it gets harder, though. I still don’t think we’re there yet. I’m not prepared to believe House districts that Trump won by double digits are really in play, with the generic ballot matchup still stuck at around four or five points. Democrats are up four or five, depending on which set of averages you use. Democrats aren’t doing well enough. And it just seems like a bunch of these Senate races are on a knife’s edge, and many could go the wrong way at once.
Rosenberg: No, no. I think, first of all, everything’s within margin of error, right, in these polls. And yes, we have a long—we have three and a half—people start voting in two months, but we’ve got three and a half months till election day. Anything can happen. In 2014, for example, we were even in every battleground state on Labor Day, and we ended up losing most of those races.
The second thing is that our candidates have a lot of money that they’re going to be able to spend, much more. The Republicans have more money in the aggregate, but our candidates have more money, which is where you would rather have the advantage. And I think the fundraising has been important.
I think that, in terms of what you’re thinking about, Greg—which is, how do we continue to improve our standing—I think that putting out a simple national agenda, you know, we want to roll back the tariffs, we want to increase the funding of the ACA, whatever it is—I’m ecumenical about what it is, right? But we need something to point to, to give people a reason to vote for us, which I think can, again, marginally improve our position, which is already a very strong position in the election.
Rosenberg: Yeah, I don’t think this is that hard. I think that you and I could sit here and craft a three- or four- or five-point agenda that would be very consistent with where polling is and what people want, that shows that we are going to fight for them.
Sargent: Rightly so, right.
And I just want to, I guess this is perhaps my final point today—we have unbelievably good candidates all across the country. I have interviewed virtually every House and Senate candidate running this cycle in the last few months. And I’ve been doing this for 34 years, and I have been in every cycle for 34 years. Our candidates are really good. They seem confident. They feel like they’re connecting to their voters. They are raising lots of money. They’re feeling the affirmation from people on the ground. This is really important—when you have confident candidates, it’s because they feel like their message is connecting back home.
People understand that the Trump guys are bad guys, and that they’re corrupt, and that Trump is morally deficient. And it’s weighing down the entire Republican brand around character and virtue issues. And in the New York Times polling, when they asked what was the most important reason you were voting for one of the Democratic Senate candidates, the number one issue wasn’t inflation or health care, it was character.
Sargent: I really hope Democrats listen to what you’re saying about the agenda, though, because I think we’re still not there. The flip side, though, is that Republicans are saying pretty clearly, to Politico and other places, that the whole thing is falling apart for Donald Trump. Simon Rosenberg, good to have you on. Again, I hope Dems listen to you.
Rosenberg: It happens from time to time, Greg.
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