Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
So we’re going to talk about all of it with MS Now’s Steve Benen, who had a good piece pointing out how the data wrecks Trump’s midterm argument. Steve, always good to have you on.
Sargent: So Donald Trump’s boasts this week were quite striking. First, he claimed that his rallies are giving a huge boost to Republicans.
Sargent: Then he claimed that his presidency has been a stupendous economic success, insisting that costs are coming down and would soon get even better.
Sargent: Steve, the story Trump is telling here is clear. Republicans are going to have a good midterm election because he’s world-historically successful and popular, right?
And of course, it’s ridiculous for any number of reasons, not the least of which is we know for a fact that Donald Trump is wildly unpopular, that Americans are not buying this at all. The recent Pew Research poll found him at just 30 percent approval, which is ridiculous.
Sargent: Well, since you brought up the data, I’m going to bring some more here. Nate Silver has Democrats up 8.6 points in the generic House ballot matchup. That means it’s pressing up against nine points.
Steve, what do you make of all that? I mean, the data is all pointing in one direction right now. Of course, the data can always be wrong. We want to underscore that. But what it’s telling us right now is pretty clear, isn’t it?
Having said that, however, it’s not just the public polling that we’re relying on. We’re also relying on the fact that Republicans are moving money around in such a way as to suggest that they’re panicking about races that they would ordinarily be confident about.
Sargent: Well, in fact, a big piece of data just dropped: the Consumer Price Index report, which is out Wednesday. It found that prices overall had their largest monthly increase in five months. Prices were 3.7 percent higher than the same time in 2025. Gas prices up big time. The cause of the rise in energy prices is largely Trump’s war.
Benen: What really matters is the impact on real families and real consumers and the people who are struggling with being able to make ends meet. Having said that, this is an election season, and we’re three weeks out from an election. We’re in an environment where people are voting early, or they’re getting ready to cast their ballots.
Two weeks ago we had bad jobs data. The economy is right now at a point where we’re having the second-worst job creation since the Great Recession. And so, with all that put together, it’s not surprising that Americans are showing this incredible frustration with the state of the economy, despite Donald Trump’s absurdities on the matter on a daily basis.
So also, you’ve got Politico now reporting that top Republicans are conceding that the House is all but gone for them. As you pointed out, they’ve been pulling money out of races that are easier for Democrats to win and transferring it to ones that are harder to win, which means they’re in triage mode. They’re giving up on some of the lowest-tier seats as lost, to save ones that should be safe.
Benen: Exactly right. And they have their own internal polling that we don’t necessarily see, but we can see their moves. I mean, on the one hand, I can appreciate the fact that they want to put a public spin on this. But on the other hand, money talks. We don’t need to pay attention necessarily to what they’re saying.
Sargent: As you say, the money talks, and we should talk about the Senate races as well, because Republicans are largely pulling their money out of both the North Carolina and the Georgia Senate races, and they’re starting to put this money into places like South Carolina and Kansas.
But I think maybe Alaska, Ohio. The fact that they’re putting money into places like Kansas and Nebraska and South Carolina really does make it look as if those once very tough seats are actually really in the game now. And again, these are states that Trump carried by double digits.
And all that made perfect sense. People like you and me were looking at that list and saying, well, yeah, of course, these are going to be the most closely watched, the most competitive races of the 2026 cycle. And so, yeah, of course, no questions asked.
If that was happening, we would have thought to ourselves, well, then it would suggest that this election cycle is going so catastrophically bad for Republicans that they’d be ready to just jump out of their windows. And yet, having said that, those are the circumstances that we’re facing right now.
Well, there you have it. Republicans themselves are wrecking Donald Trump’s spin about how great his rallies are for them, right there.
That was the point. It was not just some byproduct. It was literally the whole goal that was set out by the White House in advance of the midterm election cycle.
And so to have Donald Trump go out of his way to make that happen, to effectively read the Democratic playbook and adopt it as his own strategy—well, we’re seeing the results play out. Of course it’s not working. Why would it make any sense to think that a president with a low-30s approval rating would want to make this entire election cycle about himself? And yet he has done so, and now the results speak for themselves.
So they creep around whispering anonymously to reporters that Trump is why they’re toast, but no one can say it publicly. You know, I have not seen anything quite like this before. You?
Because on the one hand, yes, the entire election cycle is about Donald Trump, and that is something that Democrats wanted, and now it is something that the White House wanted. But in addition to that, we’re also dealing with the effects of Donald Trump’s presidency.
And so really, it is a scenario that effectively serves as a Republican nightmare. This is exactly what they were afraid of seeing months ago, more than that, throughout Donald Trump’s second term. And yet this is something that they can’t seem to avoid, and that they’re stuck with.
So Mike Rogers is permitted to attack the tariff war, to attack Trump’s policy, but he’s not allowed to say who actually is the author of the policy. The ad doesn’t say a thing about the fact that Donald Trump is the one who initiated this trade war, and it doesn’t say, obviously, a thing about the fact that Donald Trump is saying over and over that policies like this are actually bringing costs down.
Benen: No, that’s exactly right. I mean, in recent weeks we’ve seen a lot of these kinds of tactics, where Byron Donalds is scrubbing his website, for example, and removing any references to Donald Trump. And we see Republicans like Greg Abbott saying, well, Donald Trump is in town, but I’m busy, I have these plans, I can’t quite make it to his rally, I’m sure it’ll be fine.
And so I’m not unsympathetic. They have to try and thread this needle, because they know the minute they say anything that’s critical of Trump, they know that he’ll be on his social media platform condemning them and telling Republicans that these guys are RINOs and that they’re betraying the MAGA base and so on. And so, this is the Republican Party in 2026.
Sargent: There really is not. OK, to close this out, let’s just talk about where the Senate map is going. It looks as if North Carolina’s off the board. It looks as if Georgia’s off the board. So North Carolina, that’s one seat that Democrats can, I think, count on getting.
So where are you on the other stuff? You know, Texas, knife’s edge. Ohio, I think Sherrod Brown’s ahead, but also on a knife’s edge. Iowa, very tough. But there is a path with those three and Alaska. You can see the path. Which ones do you feel good about right now?
So if we work from the assumption that North Carolina is going Democrats’ way, and I think that that’s a relatively safe assumption, that’s 48 seats. At that point, we’re down to the final seven. So: Alaska, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Michigan, Ohio, Texas.
But really, I think your summary is sound. I mean, I think Talarico continues to lead in polls in Texas. I think Sherrod Brown—I think, in fact, Jon Husted hasn’t led in a poll in Ohio, I think, since the summer.
I actually think you and I might disagree a little bit on Kansas. I think Adam Hamilton is running a very strong campaign, and in fact I think he is well positioned to be the first Democrat to win Kansas since the early 1930s. It has been a long time.
Sargent: Right. Just to boil it down: North Carolina is one, Maine is two, and Ohio is three. So you just need one more out of Iowa, Kansas, Texas, and Alaska, basically, and ideally two more out of those four to get Fetterman-proofed, right? I mean, that’s basically the size of it, I think.
I think that we’re in an environment where the things that seemed impossible—let me put it this way. We look back at 2024. I remember, in the immediate aftermath of 2024, Republicans weren’t just going into the majority. They were considered to be ascendant. We were entering an era of GOP dominance.
And yet, here we are, what is it, not quite two years later. And not only have conditions changed, they’ve reversed. Everything that we were told in the immediate aftermath of 2024 looks absurd in hindsight.
Sargent: Absolutely, Steve. And you know, if Democrats do win the House, or the House and the Senate, and it’s clear that Donald Trump’s catastrophic presidency is why, it would be nice if there was something of a reckoning for commentators who jumped the gun and predicted that, because of Trump’s 2024 win, we were in the midst of a great realignment. But that reckoning will not happen. Steve Benen, always, always great to talk to you, man. Thanks so much for coming on.
Benen: Thank you so much.
Hence then, the article about transcript trump boast about rallies wrecked by humiliating gop leaks was published today ( ) and is available on The New Republic ( Middle East ) The editorial team at PressBee has edited and verified it, and it may have been modified, fully republished, or quoted. You can read and follow the updates of this news or article from its original source.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( Transcript: Trump Boast about Rallies Wrecked by Humiliating GOP Leaks )
Also on site :