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 digging through all of it with Tom Schaller, who has a good piece for the Public Notice Substack on the fizzling of MAGA culture war slop. Tom, good to have you on.
Sargent: So the New York Times talked to a lot of White House insiders and now reports that the mood among them is grim. Republicans are privately warning Trump not to campaign in any swing areas because he’s too toxic.
Schaller: Parties generally focus on base mobilization in the late stages. They believe that the conversion window for persuadable voters is largely closed, even though this is the time period of so-called closing arguments. So it’s not unusual for either party, whether they control the White House or not, to try to focus on base mobilization.
The fact that he’s campaigning in deeply red states to try to protect Senate seats is the tell. And it’s base mobilization to pull the bacon out of the fire for incumbents in states you’d normally never think would be in trouble.
And so it’s all triage. It’s packaged as him on offense, as him rallying huge crowds, but it’s really a profoundly defensive posture at its core. It’s again in places that he won by double digits, and they’re desperately trying to get out that Trump base in order to compensate for his deep losses among the middle of the electorate, even in those places. I think that’s what’s going on.
We’ve already seen early waves of it. The seven House Republicans who voted to curb Trump’s Iran war powers, the votes against, or at least public declarations against, his tariff policies, courageous always-concerned Susan Collins vocally criticizing Trump and asking for these recent exemptions on certain Canadian tariffs. So it’s desperation.
Sargent: God, I hope so, man. I hope that’s enough to do it, although one never knows. I want to point out that you mentioned something like a 54- to 55-seat result for Democrats. We should stress, that’s at the outer tiers of what’s possible here. That’s like if things go really, really well.
That’s a Trump insider who called Trump’s media diet AI slop, by the way. And others tell the Times that Trump is “increasingly cloistered” with a small group of “acolytes.” Now, obviously that’s Natalie Harp.
Schaller: Yeah, he’s obviously living in a bubble. And as much as they have to limit his consumption of the content, I feel like they would love to find ways to limit his delivery of the content. I mean, he goes so off the page. I know you’ve already probably talked on earlier pods about this remarking on Jon Husted’s physique, bringing up old stories that are completely irrelevant and, like, sort of Trump 2024 greatest hits.
Like, 78 percent is low for your own party when you’re the incumbent president. For him to think it’s 99 percent means that they literally cannot tell him the truth in the White House. And so he goes out and says things like, the economy’s great, and sure, you’re paying a little bit more for gas, but the oil companies are doing great. Like, he’s so off message, it’s absurd.
Because when they tell him that he’s at 99 percent with the Republicans, when they tell him that all the criticism that he’s receiving is bullshit, it’s just fake news, the polls that are showing his unpopularity are fake polls—he says that constantly and clearly has begun to believe it.
Schaller: My theory of the case on Trump has always been, starting in 2015, 2016, is that he’s like a comedian on the road. And I don’t mean that he’s funny, because he has no sense of humor really, and he certainly can’t self-deprecate or take a joke about himself, because he’s a malignant narcissist.
And so he goes to the old standards, because that’s what works. And he’s there really for his own ego glorification more than he is for really helping the party.
If those are right, that points to a big Democratic victory and a Senate majority of at least 52 or 53 seats. But I can tell you that top Democrats don’t believe those numbers. They don’t believe the CNN numbers. They think everything’s a toss-up. Where do you think things are?
But I’ll be surprised if Democrats lose all four, though, Greg. I mean, they’re not going to lose Kansas, Texas, Michigan, and Maine all at once. I think there’s obvious candidates that are more likely, like Kansas.
Sargent: I want to flag two numbers from the CNN polls in the deeper red states. Trump’s approval in Kansas is 42 percent, with 57 percent disapproving. In Texas, Trump’s approval is 41 percent, with 59 percent disapproving.
The book, by the way, is White Rural Rage. He wrote that with Paul Waldman. You spent a lot of time in these places. Is it possible that Donald Trump’s approval is that low in these deep red places?
I mean, I think the complaint of Democrats and liberals for years is like, how do these people keep getting fooled by these culture war politics, this culture war slop that I wrote about in Public Notice?
And I want to say, though I’m smart enough not to be fully convinced of this, I want to say maybe this is finally the moment where this wake-up is happening. And that’s why I really think, if you said to me, Tom, you can have any two Senate results you want today, four days in advance, I would say give me Iowa and give me Kansas. Because if the Democrats win Iowa, it’s a big night.
Sargent: I want to home in on that a little bit more. Kansas and Iowa are also very rural states, and they are chock full of the type of territory that you wrote about, that we’re talking about here. This is an argument that goes back decades now. Tom Frank, What’s the Matter With Kansas?—that’s sort of the touchstone that set off this kind of way of theorizing about elections and about Democrats and about the problems the party faces.
We’ve been asking, when is this going to happen? When will economic conditions finally break the hold of that stuff? And we might be on the cusp of that happening, right, Tom?
They do oppose abortion, they do want gun rights, they do want more role for the church in secular society. They are afraid of immigrants and the gay community and people who look, think, act, and pray differently from white Christian male traditional families.
And look, I should be the last person to say this is the election that does it. But like I said, I’m going to be looking very closely at the overwhelmingly white red states. Because if we see Trump losing eight, 10, 12 points in some of these rural counties, even if he wins them—I mean, even if the Republicans win them, you know, by 70 percent, but Trump did 78 or 82 or 84 percent in the last election—that is a dramatic drop-off in those counties.
And so I wonder if that’s what’s happening here as well, that some of these Democrats are figuring out how to pick the lock on the cultural stuff, but also are being assisted by the terrible economic conditions, in the sense that people are now opening their ears to these Democrats. What do you think of that?
But notice that this week there’s a story that, like, Fox News viewership is down, like, 29 percent year against year, and is falling in the ratings, and people like Jesse Watters are being tuned out. Now, maybe that’s a short-term thing, and people don’t want to turn on the screen and listen to Republicans like Secretary Bessent or Trump himself say, hey, the economy’s actually really great, when they know they’re being lied to right to their face.
Sargent: So let’s conclude on JD Vance. You mentioned that you’re going to be looking very closely at some of these results in very deep rural areas. JD Vance is someone who’s really all in on the idea that MAGA’s cultural power, the cultural hold of Trumpism, is still fundamentally intact. I think that’s what he thinks.
I wonder, if this election goes as we hope it does, I wonder whether people will start to look at that whole posture of his a little more skeptically and start to say, well, this guy made a bad bet, right? And this guy is essentially… he’s tied himself to a cultural movement that is kind of running its course, and he’s going to have to turn it around very quickly. I wonder if that’s going to happen. What do you think?
You’re going to think I’m crazy when I say this, but I’m going to write this piece after the election, if it’s as bad as the wave is supposed to be crashing on the Republicans. They’re going to turn on Trump. They’re going to turn on Trump, because their view is, do they still want his rotting carcass around, smelling things up for Republicans, right up until election 2028?
And, you know, there’s going to be a huge temptation for Democrats to move for impeachment and bring articles in the House, which they can with a simple majority. The question would be the Senate, of course, because you’d need some Republicans, no matter how many seats the Democrats win on Tuesday in the Senate.
Sargent: Tom Schaller, that is a very arresting image, and I don’t know if I want to think about it too much longer. Great to have you on, though, man. Always great to have you on.
Schaller: Pleasure to be here. Cheers.
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