Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
For a lot of reasons, that’s really not what Republican candidates want to hear right now. It also comes amid many new signs that Trump and MAGA voters really might not turn out. Yet it comes as well as polls show the Democratic lead in the House ballot matchup isn’t quite as high as it needs to be. To dig through how all this is really playing on the ground, we’re talking to Shripal Shah, who oversees ad expenditures at the Dem-aligned House Majority PAC. Shripal, thanks for coming on.
Sargent: You too, man. Let’s start with the striking Trump quote. Speaking to Punchbowl News, Trump is talking here about his voters and asks if they’ll turn out in the midterms with him not on the ballot. Listen.
Reporter (voiceover): Why is that?
Reporter (voiceover): Why, though?
Sargent: Shripal, not only does he admit here that GOP voters might not turn out, he also says that voters are angry at Republicans and not angry at him, which I think a lot of his voters will hear as discouraging them from voting in the midterms. What do you make of all that?
The interesting thing that we’re seeing in a lot of polling that we’re doing right now across the battleground, in specific districts—including districts outside of those tier-one coin-flip districts that were won by a Democrat or a Republican by a few thousand votes in this direction or that one—I’m talking about districts that Trump won by double digits in certain places, some in Ohio, some in Iowa, et cetera, et cetera.
Sargent: I do agree that it’s a big and undercovered story that Trump’s strong disapproval numbers are just wildly crazy. Nobody’s ever seen anything like it, as he would say. CNN’s Harry Enten points out another good point—that nationally, House Republicans are running about nine points ahead of Trump’s approval, which is stuck at around 37 percent.
Shah: I don’t know that you will ever see a scenario where uniformly you just put Trump in every single piece of communication. And I think that’s for a few different reasons. One, Trump is already baked into the cake, right? We’re not actually offering any new information to a voter about Donald Trump’s agenda. And voters generally already believe that the House Republicans and Trump are joined at the hip, rightfully, because they are.
I think our task is more informing people about how House Republicans have supported or amplified the consequences of the Trump agenda on the voters and on the American people, and that’s where you’ll see us focus.
Reporter (voiceover): Is this how you expected the second Trump term to go?
Reporter (voiceover): He also promised no new foreign wars. We’re obviously in this war in Iran, which is why we’re seeing the gas prices so high. What do you make of the president not keeping those campaign promises?
Reporter (voiceover): What would your message be to him about the economy right now, about prices, about day-to-day life?
Voter (voiceover): I was hoping that gas was going to go down so I could do something. You can’t do anything with gas prices. And you just can’t, you can’t afford to breathe at this point.
Voter (voiceover): I have. The past two years, yeah, I have. I’m actually not even voting the next time.
Shah: Yeah, I think it’s very real, and it’s not a difficult thing to comprehend when you realize he ran on releasing the Epstein files, and then they keep voting to block ‘em. He ran on lowering costs. Costs continue to go high, and that’s driven by foreign policy, but also tariffs. Promised no more wars, and now we’re in a war that allegedly has ended 30 times over in the last six weeks and is continuing to go and go. And so you can only lie to people for so long, and so many times, before they start to turn on you, and you’re seeing that.
We saw this in 2009 and ‘10 as well, but it was very similar. People, with each passing week and month—Obama owned the economy more and more, even though people believed that George Bush was responsible for the underlying challenges. He’s in charge now. You can’t continue to look backwards and expect people to give you a pass, and that’s where I think the reckoning is going to be really rooted in.
I know you can’t give me an exact number, not asking for that. Roughly, like a big chunk of those districts, or half, or less than half? What?
So we could be potentially moving away from places from an offensive posture—this district doesn’t need these resources anymore because the Republican doesn’t have a path to victory. That’s what’s happened in a lot of positive election cycles dating back to 2018, 2006, et cetera, et cetera. I would not be surprised if that’s what happens this time around.
Sargent: OK. So to ask it a little differently, of the 58 districts that are in play right now, how many do you expect will really genuinely be in play, to the point where you’re really putting money into them?
Shah: That, you’ve got to come back to me in about a month, because it could be as low as 30 to 40, or it could be as high as 50. It’s really hard to say right now. We’re still looking at every district very closely. We’re still doing a lot of polling. We’re still figuring out where we have identified opportunities for offense and to pick up a seat.
I would be willing to bet that there’s still opportunity for us over there. But until we know who we’re running against, it’s hard to handicap that race until we have the opportunity to do the things that we need to do.
And the map is continuing to shift pretty rapidly due to external events. So it’s just hard to say, the first week of August, where we think September’s going to look like and what do we think October’s going to look like.
Do you guys regard six or seven points in the generic ballot matchup as big enough? And where do you expect it to be after September and October and early November?
It’s also—despite the fact that we’re only 90 days out from election day, we’re still early. A lot of these campaigns have not really begun in earnest, particularly in the House, where the races are a lot smaller than these Senate races, and you don’t start communicating until September and litigating your case against the Republican incumbent or the Republican challenger in earnest until September.
So they’re making their data potentially a little more conservative than it ought to be, because they don’t want to bet on being too aggressive and too optimistic for the Democrats and be wrong. It’s easier to say, “Oh, we actually won by a lot, not just by a little,” and I think you will start to see those models and those screens start to shift a little bit as we get into September as well.
Sargent: You guys are polling a lot. House Majority PAC has released a lot of its internal polls, so I’m going to ask you a question about the polling. Right now, in HMP polling, are Dem candidates leading in enough districts—in a number of districts that’s sizably larger than the handful of seats that Dems need to flip to win the House? In other words, are Dems up in a big enough bloc of districts in your polling that you have a real cushion over what you need to get?
Sargent: OK. How many?
Sargent: All right. So it sounds like you guys think you’re on this trajectory to win the House. You said that if it’s a national advantage of six or seven points in the generic ballot matchup, you guys would win the House. Like, how big a margin would six or seven points get you, though?
Shah: You need to also remember, though, that the way that this gerrymander has taken place in places, particularly in Texas—they were relying on Trump 2024 numbers to draw those maps. That might be where you find that Republicans made the biggest strategic error, because I think that they believed that they had a lock on the Latino vote in South Texas particularly, when in reality, the Latino vote, dating back to 2016 if not before, is the most swingy of swingy electoral blocs there is, right?
And so I think that is where some folks are making a little bit of a miscalculation on where there is opportunity for us. You’ve seen us put out a poll last week in Texas 15 that says Pulido is winning over Congresswoman De La Cruz, and I think that is a real opportunity for us. That is a district that Trump won by double digits last time around, right? And so I just want to be clear on that.
Sargent: Shripal, can you explain the strategy behind putting data centers in so many ads? It seems like Dems are looking for a villain who isn’t Trump. Am I right in saying that, and what’s the theory of the case here?
And it taps into the sentiment that Washington’s not looking out for these people, and they only care about their donors while I’m getting screwed. That’s the cost of the Republican corruption. And all of that together is a pretty solid argument to make, and you will see us do more and more on that over the next 90 days.
Do you really think that you can flip some of those, or is it just going to be, at the end of the day, the low-hanging fruit? What are you seeing in the Trumpy rural districts right now? Is there a genuine opportunity to finally make inroads with some of these voters that have been so hard for Democrats to get to? And if so, how is that happening?
And I think for us, it is capitalizing on that with our own vision for how we would do things differently. And you are seeing candidates do that at scale, and will see candidates do that at further scale in September and October, and I think that’s where opportunities in some of these more traditionally red-leaning districts exist for 2026.
Shah: I think that voters are generally unhappy with politicians across the board, and that is not new. I think where our opportunity lies is that a lot of the terrain is offensive terrain, where an individual candidate can run and create their own brand by communicating with the voter.
Sargent: Shripal Shah, thanks so much for coming on, man. Good to see you. Appreciate it.
Shah: Appreciate it. Thank you so much.
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