Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
And indeed, Fox News just dropped some surprising ratings changes that illustrate that Democrats are now contesting some very deep red territory. Yet by all indications, Trump isn’t aware of what’s happening, as some really strange remarks he just unleashed in Texas strongly suggest.
Michael Cohen: Thanks for having me, Greg. Always great to be here.
Cohen: I mean, it’s pretty obvious that the Republicans have problems turning out their voters, and they are really not even trying to compete in blue states or even purple states so much, but they’re trying to shore up their support in red states.
I also think in a lot of places, Republicans don’t want Trump there, because he is a liability for the party. The only places where he’s not a liability are solid red states where he still has some reservoir of support and can get voters out to the polls.
Cohen: Absolutely. I think it’s pretty clear that the only asset that Trump can possibly serve to Republicans at this point in the campaign is in mobilizing that core Trump vote, which is, I mean, shrinking.
But I think it does tell you just how desperate this map has gotten for Republicans, and just that they are playing defense in a lot of places where I think about six months ago, no one would have thought they’d be playing defense.
Donald Trump (voiceover): Your country is making an absolute fortune because of the situation in the Middle East. We’re steering them all to Texas. We’re sailing to Louisiana. Alaska is a big beneficiary. Everybody is a benefit. The whole country.
Trump (voiceover): And I will tell you, more oil is right now flowing out of the Hormuz Strait. We’re thinking about renaming it the Trump Strait. Should we do it? Well, we did that with the Gulf of Mexico, into the Gulf of America. We do that with a little lake, one of the Great Lakes. Lake Ontario is now Lake America.
He really thinks this is all perceived as success, as his success, as success for our country. It’s delusional in that sense, Michael. What do you think of it?
I think what has been obvious for most of the last two years is that Trump simply does not care about what Americans care about. He cares about his ego. He cares about his vanity projects, like his ballroom and his arch and his golf course he wants to build in Washington, D.C.
He has basically turned the presidency into just his sort of ego-stroking exercise. And that’s all this is for him. And there’s no message coming out of the White House that actually is intended to appeal to non-hardcore MAGA voters. That’s where Trump is now. And I mean, you see this in these clips. He’s just—it’s just free association, but on topics that are not even related to the issues that voters care about.
But when Trump is standing there talking about how he’s rewriting names on maps and how we’re all getting rich from his war, right? He hears the crowd cheer, and I really think he thinks that that’s what America thinks.
The second thing about Iran. I mean, he is again living in a world of total delusion about what is happening in Iran. And he’s trying to keep spinning this. This is something Trump’s always done.
I mean, we are seeing increasing flows of oil coming through the straits, but that is not actually lowering oil prices, in large part because the cost of getting the oil out of the Gulf is so prohibitively expensive. In fact, ironically, the reason why oil is flowing is because the price is so high. If the price went down, we might not get as much oil flowing to the Gulf.
So I think what you’re seeing with Trump is a politician who is not only deeply out of touch with the American people, he’s deeply out of touch with reality. And I don’t think this is going to end well for him or for his party come Tuesday.
First, Fox shifted Kentucky’s sixth district from Lean Republican to Toss Up. This is a race for a GOP-held open seat. The Democrat here is a veteran and former prosecutor, Zach Dembo.
Cohen: This Kentucky race is interesting because Andy Beshear, the governor of Kentucky, who is a likely 2028 presidential contender, has invested a great deal of time and energy and his own credibility into Democrats flipping this seat. This is, like, the one seat in Kentucky that is a potential flip for Democrats. This is Andy Barr’s old seat. He’s running for Senate. And Dembo is running neck and neck.
Sargent: Yes, that’s one thing Democrats are telling me as well. Keep an eye on Kentucky six early in the night, because as you say, we’re going to get the information out of there pretty early. And by the way, even if Dembo isn’t actually winning outright, if he’s keeping it close, we’re going to know that Democrats are probably going to have a pretty good night, right?
Sargent: Yes. And the second seat that Fox just shifted is North Carolina’s 11th Congressional District. This is also a GOP-held open seat. The Democrat here is Jamie Ager. He’s a family farmer going back generations.
Cohen: What’s happening in North Carolina is pretty fascinating, because first of all, you’ve got a Senate race, with Roy Cooper running, in which he has a huge lead over Michael Whatley. In fact, the Republicans have basically taken money out of the race because they don’t think Whatley has a chance of winning.
This race you mentioned, this was a race that I think a year ago would have been seen as a lean, even likely Republican race. Now it’s lean Democratic. And you’ve got other races which were a few weeks ago solid Republican, now moving to the likely, even lean category in North Carolina. And so I think what you have here is just a couple of states where it is fairly obvious that the bottom has fallen out for Republicans. And North Carolina’s one.
I think they won a number of the down-ballot races. So this kind of prestaged what you saw in ‘24. And you have a very popular Democratic governor in Josh Stein. So I think you’re seeing Democrats making real inroads in North Carolina, and that can have a huge impact down the road into ‘28 and beyond.
And I think we’re going to look at that if Jamie Ager wins, if the Democrat wins, and it sure looks like he’s going to. We’re going to look at that and say, well, you know what, North Carolina’s really moving now.
So if we’re seeing the demographics in the eastern part of the state start to shift enough to bring this into the Democratic column in the presidential, and we’re seeing the western part of the state, the kind of huge margins that Republicans run up in these rural places, starting to come down a little bit—that’s how you get there, to shift North Carolina in 2028, right?
I mean, Arizona is not a blue state, but it’s certainly moving more in that direction. In Georgia Jon Ossoff’s going to win by a huge margin. Keisha Lance Bottoms looks like she may be able to win that governor’s race, which would be huge for Democrats if she can win. And so North Carolina could be next.
I don’t think most Democrats think this race is leaning Democratic. They think it’s very, very close. It’s a toss-up. The polling averages do have Brown up by around three points, but that’s still a dead heat, basically. What do you think about what’s going on there?
Now, I’ve got to say one thing here. We certainly could see a situation in which Republicans do end up turning out in numbers higher than we expect, and that pushes a couple of these Republican senators over the line. You could see it in Minnesota, you could see it in Mississippi, you could see it in South Carolina. I don’t know if you’ll see it in Ohio or Texas, but you’ll certainly see it in some of these places. That’s a real possibility. We shouldn’t dismiss it completely.
The question is, how big will it be? I think that really is the debate point. Is this a wave? Is this a tsunami? Or is this, I like to call it, an extinction-level event for Republicans? I don’t know the answer to that, and nobody does, but it’s one of those three possibilities, I think.
What’s your sense of the Senate if you had to make the call right now? Nate Silver has it at 75 percent odds that Democrats win the Senate. Where are you on this? Do you think Democrats win it?
Sargent: Alaska.
But here’s the problem for Democrats. All of these races, except for North Carolina and Maine, are in states where Trump won by double digits in 2024. I mean, it’s unprecedented for a party to flip this many seats that are solid red states in one election. We’re talking about it happening in two, three, or four states. That’s kind of crazy.
And the polls in Texas have shown James Talarico ahead pretty much since the summer. Same with Sherrod Brown in Ohio. Same with Mary Peltola in Alaska. You know, Adam Hamilton is routinely now leading in the polls in Kansas, and Roger Marshall is running one of the worst Senate campaigns, I’d argue, in the country.
Sargent: And we should stress that polls can be wrong, if they’re off a few points, right? If they’re off a few points in a direction that favors Republicans, all of these races basically don’t go the way we want, or most of them don’t. But the funny thing is that for all the talk about the polls being wrong, what history tells us is that in midterms during the Trump era, the polls actually haven’t been that wrong.
Cohen: I just want to say this though. I mean, you’re right about the polling. The polling could be off, the polling could be wrong. But there’s so many other data points that just back up this idea that this is going to be a huge election for Democrats.
It’s the early voting, which just suggests that Democrats are motivated to vote, and that even occasional voters who lean Democratic are turning out in record numbers. You’re seeing this in North Carolina, you’re seeing this in Texas, you’re seeing this in Virginia, to some extent Florida.
If these were purple states, I don’t think there’d be a question of where this is going. But you have to sort of take it with a grain of salt when you’re in a place like Texas where Democrats haven’t won a statewide election in 30 years.
Sargent: It certainly is. Michael Cohen, always awesome to talk to you, man. Thanks for all that.
Cohen: Pleasure. Thanks for having me.
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