The following is a lightly edited transcript of the July 23 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
A Republican operative just offered something remarkable to Politico about how the party is thinking about the midterm elections right now. The operative said this: “We’re preparing for the bottom to fall out.” This quote seems to capture something bigger. There really is a sense that things are spinning out of Trump’s control. The Iran war debacle is deepening. A bizarre new outburst from Trump suggests he’s delusional about what this really means. The polls also show Trump continuing to crater on the economy. And as Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg pointed out on his Hopium Chronicles Substack, that GOP operative’s dismay is in sync with polls we’re seeing in the Senate races, including in places that voted overwhelmingly for Trump.
But we still think there’s a long way to go, and a lot of things can go wrong. So we’re talking to Simon Rosenberg about how Democrats can close this deal, and whether all that GOP pessimism is really that justified. Simon, thanks for coming on.
Simon Rosenberg: Greg, it’s always a pleasure.
Sargent: Good to see you, Simon. So Politico’s report is really striking. One GOP operative says they’re preparing for the bottom to fall out. That operative also says that Senate races are in play in Iowa, Alaska, and Ohio, and even that House districts that Trump carried by double digits are firmly in play.
Simon, I’m just not ready to get that optimistic. If all those places are really in play—and again, this is coming from a Republican—then it really is on the verge of falling apart for Trump. Are you there yet or not? And why?
Rosenberg: No, I think we have a shot here, right? I mean, it’s a year of opportunity for us. How well we seize it is really going to be in part up to us. They’ve created a situation where he’s already fallen very far, much further than where he was in 2018 at this point. The national climate is plus seven or so, or above, for us, which means that the House should flip. We have polls showing Sherrod Brown up—independent polls showing Sherrod Brown up in Ohio, and Mary Peltola up in Alaska, and Josh Turek up in Iowa. I mean, these are states that Trump won by more than ten points.
Sargent: A lot of this has to do with the war. A second Republican close to the White House tells Politico that all this is driven by Trump’s refusal to accept that he’s lost in Iran. This Republican calls this “a classic escalation trap.”
I’m a little torn over this. On the one hand, it’s not that hard to imagine him pulling out of the war in September and declaring victory, though he’d probably have to accept a fair amount of humiliation to do that, and he might not be willing to. And yet on the other, you hear things like this from Donald Trump.
Donald Trump (voiceover): A poll just came out. Americans don’t want high gasoline prices, but they’re not against the war. That just came out loud and clear in a poll. Nobody wants Iran to have a nuclear weapon. Do you want Iran to have a nuclear weapon? You think it’s good?
Sargent: Simon, that’s really something. The new Washington Post poll finds 29 percent approve of Trump’s handling of the situation in Iran, with an extraordinary 69 percent disapproving. The contrast between him saying the war is popular and Republicans admitting the bottom is falling out over it is really something, isn’t it?
Rosenberg: Yeah, look, he can’t accept—he has said repeatedly there are no limits on his power. And what he’s finding is that there are, and he can’t accept that. And he can’t accept that the war may be the biggest mistake by an American president in all of American history. And he has no way out, because he already declared—remember, Greg, he already surrendered and declared victory once.
And that didn’t work, because Iran wasn’t playing ball with the perception that he was actually the victor. And they started asserting themselves in the Strait of Hormuz, which was an unacceptable situation for the United States and his regional partners. And so he’s now had to go back in and do what he did before, which didn’t work, which is bomb them, which was ineffective.
And so he’s in a very bad place. And the resumption of the war itself has driven up energy prices, and it’s going to reignite inflation. Interest rates are going up, the bond yields have gone up.
Sargent: One Republican operative told Politico about the war, “Nobody can really defend it.” The Post poll, by the way, says only 28 percent say the war was worth fighting, 68 percent say it wasn’t, and only 31 percent say what the U.S. is doing right now will prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon, while 66 percent are not confident of that.
Simon, if I’m reading that correctly, huge majorities are rejecting every single argument he’s making about this. I don’t know if we’ve seen such a dramatic repudiation of a president in modern times, have we?
Rosenberg: Well, and you could make the case that there’s similar data on the tariffs. So here’s Trump—prices are going back up, his standing is in the toilet, the Senate is in play now. And his tariffs are expiring. His temporary tariffs, his global tariffs, are expiring on Friday. And instead of letting them expire and saying, listen, I think it’s the right thing for the economy and the American people that I lower prices, he’s desperately slapping all sorts of new creative tariffs on the economies of the world, purposefully raising prices. He jacked up Brazil to 25 percent. He jacked up Canada to 50 percent.
So he’s now raising prices on purpose, right, in a time when all these other prices are going up. And I think for the Republicans, you have to be tearing your hair out. It’s like, dude, let the tariffs expire. Let’s claim that we’ve lowered prices for people going into the election. But he can’t do it, right? Because he can’t admit defeat. He can’t backtrack on anything. He can’t course-correct. What happens when he gets challenged is that he just doubles down and escalates, and he’s doing it on the tariffs.
Sargent: I want to underscore the importance of this, because I think it’s really lost on a lot of people. The tariffs are going to come back in a big way as we get closer to the midterms. And the tariffs are like the sleeper issue that really debilitated this president very badly in the first place. That’s what really started the inflationary stuff. And that’s when Donald Trump’s approval rating really started to unravel, particularly on the economy, over the tariffs.
And so now for him to be out there, number one, saying the Iran war is popular when it’s polling at like 28 percent, and then number two, escalating the tariffs again heading into the elections after Republicans just took this tremendous political hit over that—I think, with those two things, you see a president who is utterly disconnected from any concern over what happens to his party.
Rosenberg: Well, let’s add a third thing that’s going to erode their position before the election, which is that both the private plans and the public health care plans—people are going to start getting notices of the premium increases. And what we’re seeing in the data is that even private plans are going to see significant cost increases, and that 50 percent of businesses have said in surveys that they’re going to pass those cost increases on to workers in their companies.
And so this is all going to happen in October, right before the election—that tens and tens of millions of people are going to be formally notified that their premiums are going to increase because of Donald Trump and the Republicans, right before the election.
And then finally, you could add a fourth, which is we’re starting to get data that people are being pushed off of SNAP at a much higher rate than was anticipated. And so you’ve now got potentially tens of millions of people falling into greater food insecurity than was anticipated. And so all of these trend lines together add up to this basic reality, which is that Donald Trump and the Republicans have purposefully done extraordinary harm to the American people and to the United States itself in order to enrich themselves and their friends. And it is an extraordinary betrayal of the American people. People have figured it out.
And every argument he makes—I mean, this is the point you made that I think is really important—he can’t get to a majority on anything that he’s doing any longer. He’s so distant from the electorate. And what it means for us is that we’ve got a shot, we’ve got a chance to have a really meaningful election where we really degrade MAGA’s power all across the country, which is why we’ve got to be working as hard as we can heading into November.
Sargent: Simon, let me add yet another thing that I think is going to be working against them, which is that the ICE killings just started up.
Rosenberg: Yeah. Sorry, how did we forget that? Number five, let’s add number five to the list.
Sargent: Right, right. I seriously—I mean, we got ICE just killed two people, one in Texas, one in Maine, where there’s a very competitive Senate race. We have a piece up at NewRepublic.com on the Senate race in Maine and how it’s going to be impacted by the ICE killing. Check that out, folks.
But so there you’ve got yet another area where Trump is absolutely disconnected from the impact this is having on Republicans. This is a really bad issue for Republicans. You had mentioned that Trump can’t get to a majority on any issue. That now includes immigration, and the ICE killings are getting worse again.
Rosenberg: Yeah. And I would just say to that—I mean, Tom Homan has been, for whatever reason, very vocal, very visible the last couple of days. And the guy is really a barbarian, right? I mean, the stuff he’s saying is so fundamentally illiberal and inhumane. He’s doing this, you know, like, hey, people wouldn’t get killed in the streets if they would follow law enforcement—meaning that he’s sort of sanctioning extrajudicial killing of Americans on our soil.
And it’s just—it is shocking how Nazi-like and fascistic the language is when they get challenged, right? When they are feeling weak, they revert back to this kind of psychotic language about people, this inhumanity, this sort of disrespect and contempt they have for everyday people, which is sort of the core of their politics.
And so I agree with you, Greg. Listen, adding to what you just said about Maine—there’s almost no state in the country that gets punished more by Canadian tariffs than Maine. And so Susan Collins not only had this ICE killing last week, she’s now got to contend with Trump’s whimsical, punitive—for whatever reason, he got up and decided to punish Canada again, because it’s his battered wife, right? He’s now putting Susan Collins into another terrible position.
And so, yeah, look, it is extraordinary. What I wrote in my piece today is that usually when a president or a political leader in a democracy is in a position like Trump is, they’re trying to do everything they can to do things that help people and to make themselves popular again. And he’s doing the opposite. And it’s part of the reason that the Republicans realize that they’re attached to sort of a crazy man.
If you think about what’s happened in the Senate, Donald Trump hasn’t been helping the Senate Republicans. His major contribution to their reelection campaigns was to defeat two of them, as opposed to get them elected. So they don’t feel that he actually cares. I mean, he cares because he wants to protect himself from the hearings and everything else, but he’s not acting as if that is actually a priority for him, in partnering with the House and Senate Republicans to do things.
Think about the housing bill, Greg, right? I’m sure you’ve covered this extensively. He denied them the ability to do this big public event showing that they did something to lower prices in the United States. He killed that event and buried that bill. And it ended up passing, but without his signature. And so they are aware that he’s acting impulsively, irrationally. They can’t trust him to lead their party into the midterms. And that’s why you get these kind of comments from Politico today.
Sargent: OK, this is where it gets harder, though. I still don’t think we’re there yet. I’m not prepared to believe House districts that Trump won by double digits are really in play, with the generic ballot matchup still stuck at around four or five points. Democrats are up four or five, depending on which set of averages you use. Democrats aren’t doing well enough. And it just seems like a bunch of these Senate races are on a knife’s edge, and many could go the wrong way at once.
If you look at the Times polling, the New York Times polling of Senate races, which I trust—I really think The New York Times is probably the gold standard poll right now—they had Texas tied, but they had Democrats a hair behind in Iowa, Alaska, and Ohio. That’s not going to get you there. Am I wrong to look at it this way?
Rosenberg: No, no. I think, first of all, everything’s within margin of error, right, in these polls. And yes, we have a long—we have three and a half—people start voting in two months, but we’ve got three and a half months till election day. Anything can happen. In 2014, for example, we were even in every battleground state on Labor Day, and we ended up losing most of those races.
There are two things you have to keep in mind, though, Greg. One is that when you’re the party out of power in an election like this—it’s almost always the case, there’s no rules in politics, right, but there’s things that we know—that things break away from the incumbent party at the end. That’s part of what happened to us in 2024. That’s the likely scenario. The likely scenario is that things get better for us as we get closer to election day.
The second thing is that our candidates have a lot of money that they’re going to be able to spend, much more. The Republicans have more money in the aggregate, but our candidates have more money, which is where you would rather have the advantage. And I think the fundraising has been important.
And then the third thing I would say is that I’m hopeful that Democrats release some kind of modest agenda that says that if you vote for us, we’re going to do these three or four things that will give people more of a reason to vote for us, and not just vote against Trump. It’s what we did in 2006. We had this “six for ‘06,” we called it, in the big midterm win that we had in ‘06.
I think that, in terms of what you’re thinking about, Greg—which is, how do we continue to improve our standing—I think that putting out a simple national agenda, you know, we want to roll back the tariffs, we want to increase the funding of the ACA, whatever it is—I’m ecumenical about what it is, right? But we need something to point to, to give people a reason to vote for us, which I think can, again, marginally improve our position, which is already a very strong position in the election.
Sargent: I just feel like party leaders seem a tiny bit complacent. They don’t seem to feel like they’ve really got to make a big argument against Trump. They don’t seem to be willing to go out and do what you’re rightly advising them to do, which is to be extremely clear about what a Democratic Congress means.
Rosenberg: Yeah, I don’t think this is that hard. I think that you and I could sit here and craft a three- or four- or five-point agenda that would be very consistent with where polling is and what people want, that shows that we are going to fight for them.
Because look, what we know from polling—we know from the exit polls, we know from tons of polling that’s been done over the last year and a half—that people believe that Democrats’ hearts are in the right place, that we want to do the right thing, that we’re on their side. What they question is whether or not we’re tough enough to be able to deliver for them once we’re in power.
Sargent: Rightly so, right.
Rosenberg: Right, but this is very consistent through the polling. So we have to show them that we’re tough enough to deliver for them in power—in part by being more pointed, by fighting with Trump more directly and being aggressive in the contest. And I think that whether we’re coasting or whether we’re taking stuff for granted—I don’t think our candidates are.
And I just want to, I guess this is perhaps my final point today—we have unbelievably good candidates all across the country. I have interviewed virtually every House and Senate candidate running this cycle in the last few months. And I’ve been doing this for 34 years, and I have been in every cycle for 34 years. Our candidates are really good. They seem confident. They feel like they’re connecting to their voters. They are raising lots of money. They’re feeling the affirmation from people on the ground. This is really important—when you have confident candidates, it’s because they feel like their message is connecting back home.
And so the other thing I’ll just say, if I can say this last thing, Greg—and I just want to put this out there as food for thought. There have been a lot of theories about how we need to win again, kicking around out there. And I can tell you one thing that we saw in the New York Times polling, and that I have seen in my own interviews with these candidates, is that character and virtue really matter this cycle.
People understand that the Trump guys are bad guys, and that they’re corrupt, and that Trump is morally deficient. And it’s weighing down the entire Republican brand around character and virtue issues. And in the New York Times polling, when they asked what was the most important reason you were voting for one of the Democratic Senate candidates, the number one issue wasn’t inflation or health care, it was character.
And so we have a huge advantage around character this cycle that is also becoming a central reason why we’re winning. And the truth is, we have candidates of great character, who are virtuous people, admirable people. And people are responding to that. And my God, what a thing—that if we could take anything away from this election, that there’s still an ability to sell virtue and character as part of, in the Epstein era, right? It’s a good sign of where we’re not only going in this election, but our ability to create accountability and to restore democracy after this election, too.
Sargent: I really hope Democrats listen to what you’re saying about the agenda, though, because I think we’re still not there. The flip side, though, is that Republicans are saying pretty clearly, to Politico and other places, that the whole thing is falling apart for Donald Trump. Simon Rosenberg, good to have you on. Again, I hope Dems listen to you.
Rosenberg: It happens from time to time, Greg.
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