Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
All this comes as Donald Trump unleashed a string of crazed Truth Social posts about the midterm results, and vowed that he’s really, truly about to preside over huge successes any day now.
Paul Waldman: Good to see you too, Greg.
Paul, I guess he’s blaming the voters there. What I find interesting is he really thinks most Americans are already regretting their choice. What did you make of that?
What he’s saying now is that they didn’t do that sufficiently. But the truth is, that’s precisely why Republicans lost. It’s because, in some ways, people did see that he was on the ballot. And we have this extraordinary sweep that’s really bigger than anything we’ve seen since the 1974 post-Watergate midterms.
Sargent: I thought it was also funny how Trump responded to the market downturn by saying this: “Do not fear, we will soon, one way or the other, be BIGGER AND STRONGER THAN EVER BEFORE.”
Waldman: Yeah, it’s not like he’s going to make some major policy reversal, because the things that have damaged the economy, especially, are the things that he did, and not just sort of big broad forces. I mean, yes, there’s a lot of dissatisfaction with fundamental things about the economy, like the cost of health care, the cost of housing.
And the other question is the war in Iran. Now, he may look for a way out. That may be the one thing that he does, in fact, change. It’s entirely possible that he’ll look at how the public feels about the war in Iran—even JD Vance, his vice president, said that that was the main reason why they lost, which you can debate—but Trump may say, OK, now I’m going to see if I can find some way to get the heck out of there and declare victory.
Sargent: Well, Republicans are really going to want him to do that, because they’re looking forward. He’s a lame duck, but they’ve got an election in 2028 to deal with, and they know it’s trouble. Politico talked to a bunch of Republican strategists who are admitting the debacle has blown up their 2028 map.
Waldman: Yeah. If Democrats win Texas in any presidential campaign in the near future, there is absolutely no way Republicans can win the presidency. And if Democrats are smart, I think they would take a couple of billion dollars—that’s billion with a B—and open up an office in every single one of Texas’s 254 counties, and really start organizing on the ground, because that can be the entire ball game.
That, among other things, means that there will probably be a Black Democrat elected to the Senate from Mississippi for the first time since Reconstruction. And one of the questions is, can you maintain that? Can you take it into a presidential campaign?
The governor, the lieutenant governor, the attorney general, the railroad commissioner, the school board. It was up and down. And they took one of the chambers of the state legislature. And now they’re in a position there to build something, if they can find the means and the will to invest in it. And that could be the biggest battleground of the 2028 election.
But you can even go broader and say that what happened in the South is big for the electoral map. I think North Carolina really might be coming into the Democratic column now. It’s still a swing state, very much a swing state. It’ll be incredibly hot, hard-fought in the 2028 presidential. But Trump only won it by three points in 2024.
Waldman: It really will. North Carolina is a genuine swing state. There’s going to be a hot Senate race there in 2028, with Ted Budd up for reelection. And that was a state that not long ago was won by Barack Obama.
Every other midterm and presidential election since 2004, the president’s party has lost. And the Republicans are still going to be the party in power, for all intents and purposes, in 2028, because that’s just a matter of who the president is.
Sargent: A hundred percent. Let’s go to Ohio and Iowa now. Trump turned those states red. That was one of his big achievements. But Democrats just won the gubernatorial and Senate races in both. GOP strategist Kurt Steiner, who’s from Ohio, told Politico that “Ohio should be considered a battleground”—meaning in 2028. And Bob Vander Plaats, who’s a big Iowa evangelical leader, said this: “Trump’s brand did a lot of good for the state of Iowa, but you can also die by the brand as well.”
But then his agenda of tariffs and war, which hit the Midwest pretty hard, was uniquely successful in wrecking GOP standing in both. It’s really just a whiplash event, really, don’t you think?
Democrats have managed to find some really appealing candidates there, and it can change the way people understand the brand. So Trump did so much damage to a state like Iowa with all of his policies.
And also, the legacy of the Trump years makes it a lot easier for Democrats to say to them, you know, you got sold a bill of goods, and you don’t have to punish yourself for having bought it, but now we have something much better to offer you. And don’t forget what the Republicans did to you over the last few years.
Sargent: I think it’s worth pointing out as well that in places like Iowa and Ohio, and Texas too, there was also a rebellion against local Republican rule. And so now that Democrats are in control of these statehouses, they can show that they can rule locally better than Republicans did.
A lot of this one was just a reaction, a revulsion at Trump, a revulsion at local Republican rule. Maybe some efforts by these Democratic governors and local officials, who have taken all these new spots in these places, can start to sell voters on Democratic rule in some sense. What do you think? Is that possible?
But in rural Texas, there are no private schools. People rely on their public schools. Even if you wanted to use a voucher, you couldn’t. And they proved very unpopular.
And now the trick is, can Democrats in Texas find ways to do things that will reverse some of that, and make people feel like they’re getting something tangible out of Democrats being in charge?
Sargent: So there’s one more really interesting quote, from Marc Short, who was in the Trump administration last time. He spoke to Politico as well. He pointed out that Democrats won big in the 2006 midterms, but then that Republicans really bottomed out even more two years later with Barack Obama’s 2008 victory, and suggested that what just happened could set the stage for something similar.
And I think after what just happened, you can no longer sort of conclude in advance that the presidential electorate helps Republicans, because without Trump there anymore to get out that particular demographic that he gets out in presidential years, and with the Republican Party having cratered so badly, you could see Democrats be able to start getting these more sporadic voters better than they have in the past. What do you think of all that?
And I think Democrats are now looking in places that they didn’t think they could be competitive and saying, OK, well, let’s actually invest some money there, let’s invest energy there.
Sargent: One thing that’s really interesting about this is, if you think about it in kind of two tiers, you’ve got the Midwestern states that Trump had transferred to the red column, in a permanent sense, it seemed like, at least.
The old take on Democrats was that young voters, minorities, that was their future, right? But now you see them making these gains in both places, right? In the South and the West, on the one hand, in the places where demographics are favoring them, but also in these older, whiter states. That, I think, has to terrify Republicans right there, because it’s a double whammy, isn’t it?
That’s probably the case with Scott Colom in Mississippi, that maybe they got a quarter of the white vote, which sounds like it’s very small, but for Mississippi, that’s pretty good. And they got huge turnout among Black voters.
And there really is no evidence that that was about much more than the particular circumstances of the 2024 election. It doesn’t mean that, you know, Democrats have assembled any kind of permanent majority. But if they can keep their coalition together and begin to pull over a few of those white voters, especially younger white voters, that can be pretty close to unbeatable.
And of course, at the same time, the swings were even bigger among Latinos. They moved 29 points in a Democratic direction, right? They won Latinos by 40 points, 69 to 29. And then they won Blacks by an even more lopsided margin there.
Waldman: Yeah. And it’s unlikely that the Democratic presidential nominee in 2028 is going to win by 13 points, which is the margin that Democrats won in the House vote this year. But they don’t have to win by 13 points. If they can just build on some of those gains they made and hold some of those people, then that will be enough. And the way that the vote looks like it could be distributed is going to be very much advantageous.
But now it may be that in the next couple of elections, Democrats will be the ones who start off with an Electoral College map that looks very much in their favor. And they don’t have to have a blowout in order to win. They could have a squeaker of a win, and the Electoral College will give them the margin that they need.
He won them by enormous margins, especially blue-collar whites. But at the same time, he also chipped away at Democratic positions with minority voters, right? He chipped away at working-class Latinos especially, but also Blacks a little bit.
And it’s hard to see—like, without Trump, there’s no way a Republican duplicates that Trump coalition. And now they’re even more on a back foot, having suffered this loss, I think.
And I don’t see anybody on the Republican side about whom you’d say, wow, that guy is dynamite. And you know, if JD Vance is going to be their nominee, they’re going to have a lot to overcome.
Waldman: True. Meatball Ron. You know, you’ve got to hand it to Trump. That was a good nickname.
Waldman: Yeah, they just don’t have a lot in the charisma department.
Waldman: Yeah, it may be. And you’ve heard me complain before about how Democrats have campaigned, or not campaigned, in rural areas, where everything was so apologetic, and basically approaching voters on their knees.
And even, as you say, candidates as different as Talarico and El-Sayed, they are both willing to go anywhere and make the argument to anyone. And I think that communicates a kind of strength that can open up new opportunities where Democrats haven’t had them before.
And if you want to find more from Paul, check out his own Substack, The Cross Section, or you can find him at the Public Notice Substack of Aaron Rupar. Paul, awesome to talk to you. Thanks for coming on, man.
Waldman: Hey, thanks so much, Greg.
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