The following is a lightly edited transcript of the August 10 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.
In a new interview, Donald Trump lavished extensive praise on himself as always, but in the process, he made a surprising admission. He said straight out that his voters might not turn out for Republican candidates in the midterms. Then he said that voters are not angry at him, they’re angry at Republicans.
For a lot of reasons, that’s really not what Republican candidates want to hear right now. It also comes amid many new signs that Trump and MAGA voters really might not turn out. Yet it comes as well as polls show the Democratic lead in the House ballot matchup isn’t quite as high as it needs to be. To dig through how all this is really playing on the ground, we’re talking to Shripal Shah, who oversees ad expenditures at the Dem-aligned House Majority PAC. Shripal, thanks for coming on.
Shripal Shah: Appreciate you having me. Good to see you.
Sargent: You too, man. Let’s start with the striking Trump quote. Speaking to Punchbowl News, Trump is talking here about his voters and asks if they’ll turn out in the midterms with him not on the ballot. Listen.
Donald Trump (voiceover): If I don’t run, will those people go out and vote? And that’s the one thing I can’t te—I’m going to ask them to. The question is, will they vote? ‘Cause a lot of them are very angry at Republicans, to be honest with you.
Reporter (voiceover): Why is that?
Trump (voiceover): They’re angry at Repu—I don’t know. They’re angry at Republicans, but they’re not angry at me. That’s an interesting thing.
Reporter (voiceover): Why, though?
Trump (voiceover): They’re not angry at me, but they are angry at Republicans.
Sargent: Shripal, not only does he admit here that GOP voters might not turn out, he also says that voters are angry at Republicans and not angry at him, which I think a lot of his voters will hear as discouraging them from voting in the midterms. What do you make of all that?
Shah: I think for the first time in what seems like a long time, he’s actually spot on as far as his voters not showing up in a midterm. And that’s not spin coming from a Democratic operative or anything like that. We have evidence, right? Based on history, you can likely bank on that. And I think that one underscores a lot of the challenges that Republicans saw across the board in 2022. And I would not be surprised to see this cycle continue on that trajectory for 2026.
The interesting thing that we’re seeing in a lot of polling that we’re doing right now across the battleground, in specific districts—including districts outside of those tier-one coin-flip districts that were won by a Democrat or a Republican by a few thousand votes in this direction or that one—I’m talking about districts that Trump won by double digits in certain places, some in Ohio, some in Iowa, et cetera, et cetera.
It’s not just that he’s underwater. The data that we are seeing suggests that the intensity behind his negative approval, or strongly disapprove or strongly unfavorable—there are places, it’s not uncommon what we’re seeing, that number north of 50, which is unprecedented.
Sargent: I do agree that it’s a big and undercovered story that Trump’s strong disapproval numbers are just wildly crazy. Nobody’s ever seen anything like it, as he would say. CNN’s Harry Enten points out another good point—that nationally, House Republicans are running about nine points ahead of Trump’s approval, which is stuck at around 37 percent.
Trump’s numbers are just terrible. But it’s a little unclear to me, at least now, whether Democrats are orienting their strategy around that. Very roughly speaking, do you anticipate that Trump will appear in a lot of House Majority ads this fall, or only some, or not too many?
Shah: I don’t know that you will ever see a scenario where uniformly you just put Trump in every single piece of communication. And I think that’s for a few different reasons. One, Trump is already baked into the cake, right? We’re not actually offering any new information to a voter about Donald Trump’s agenda. And voters generally already believe that the House Republicans and Trump are joined at the hip, rightfully, because they are.
Now, are there certain exceptions? Absolutely, there will be exceptions, particularly with certain audiences. But what we have found is that you don’t necessarily need to lead with that in a way that makes the argument incredibly over the top and in your face, because I think voters already fully understand that.
I think our task is more informing people about how House Republicans have supported or amplified the consequences of the Trump agenda on the voters and on the American people, and that’s where you’ll see us focus.
Sargent: Trump is so unpopular that he’s even losing parts of his base. A recent Politico poll finds only a little more than one-third of MAGA voters say the war is now worth the costs, and there’s been a sharp drop in MAGA support for the war. Now, let’s listen to this as well. It’s an interviewer talking to Trump voters. The first voice is the reporter, and then you’ll hear the Trump voters. Check this out.
Reporter (voiceover): Is this how you expected the second Trump term to go?
Voter (voiceover): No, not at all. I hoped it was going to be so much better.
Reporter (voiceover): He also promised no new foreign wars. We’re obviously in this war in Iran, which is why we’re seeing the gas prices so high. What do you make of the president not keeping those campaign promises?
Voter (voiceover): He just told us what we wanted to hear to vote him back in.
Reporter (voiceover): What would your message be to him about the economy right now, about prices, about day-to-day life?
Voter (voiceover): I would tell him, ‘You promised us you would lower prices, bring back what it used to be.’
Voter (voiceover): I was hoping that gas was going to go down so I could do something. You can’t do anything with gas prices. And you just can’t, you can’t afford to breathe at this point.
Reporter (voiceover): Are you regretting your vote right now?
Voter (voiceover): I have. The past two years, yeah, I have. I’m actually not even voting the next time.
Sargent: Shripal, MAGA is plainly cracking up here. The coalition is in major fracture mode. Can you tell us what you’re seeing both in the data and on the ground on that front?
Shah: Yeah, I think it’s very real, and it’s not a difficult thing to comprehend when you realize he ran on releasing the Epstein files, and then they keep voting to block ‘em. He ran on lowering costs. Costs continue to go high, and that’s driven by foreign policy, but also tariffs. Promised no more wars, and now we’re in a war that allegedly has ended 30 times over in the last six weeks and is continuing to go and go. And so you can only lie to people for so long, and so many times, before they start to turn on you, and you’re seeing that.
I think people are no longer willing to just turn a blind eye to what is in front of them when it has such a deep impact on their day-to-day lives, like that woman who was talking about filling up her tank and not being able to afford to breathe. You can’t continue to try and pull one over on people when their reality is directly at odds with what you’re trying to sell them.
We saw this in 2009 and ‘10 as well, but it was very similar. People, with each passing week and month—Obama owned the economy more and more, even though people believed that George Bush was responsible for the underlying challenges. He’s in charge now. You can’t continue to look backwards and expect people to give you a pass, and that’s where I think the reckoning is going to be really rooted in.
Sargent: OK, so there are around 58 GOP-held districts that are really in play right now. Can I ask, this fall, as we really approach the election, how many of those districts do you think House Majority PAC will really fully play in? Like, real investments and real money.
I know you can’t give me an exact number, not asking for that. Roughly, like a big chunk of those districts, or half, or less than half? What?
Shah: I think that what you’re going to see—in the same way that you saw in 2006, 2008, 2018, et cetera—is that it’s not necessarily playing in every single place, but the battlefield is going to move pretty dramatically from early September to mid-October, in that we could hypothetically, if things continue on a good trajectory, not necessarily have to expend a lot of resources in tier-one places that six months ago I would’ve told you, like, We are going to be there till the end, because the environment is shifting in such a rapid way, where Republicans are cutting and running from certain districts that just don’t have paths to them that they thought maybe they were going to, and the terrain just shifts.
So we could be potentially moving away from places from an offensive posture—this district doesn’t need these resources anymore because the Republican doesn’t have a path to victory. That’s what’s happened in a lot of positive election cycles dating back to 2018, 2006, et cetera, et cetera. I would not be surprised if that’s what happens this time around.
But we are competing with MAGA Inc., that has close to a trillion dollars to spend, and that is one of the dynamics that could make it more consistent, where you’re just in a lot of places, as opposed to things shifting from one to another. A lot of it depends on how September plays out.
Sargent: OK. So to ask it a little differently, of the 58 districts that are in play right now, how many do you expect will really genuinely be in play, to the point where you’re really putting money into them?
I understand that there’s going to be a core of races in the middle, the most competitive races, where you may just actually pull resources out ‘cause they’re pretty much squared away. What’s the size of the battlefield at the end of this, do you think?
Shah: That, you’ve got to come back to me in about a month, because it could be as low as 30 to 40, or it could be as high as 50. It’s really hard to say right now. We’re still looking at every district very closely. We’re still doing a lot of polling. We’re still figuring out where we have identified opportunities for offense and to pick up a seat.
Look at the—the map is dynamic because of their activities as well, right? Chuck Edwards sits in North Carolina, his 11th District, which is a district that I believe Trump won by close to double digits last time around. Couple days ago he announced he’s not running anymore, right? And so they’ve got to find a new candidate. We don’t know what that does to that race.
I would be willing to bet that there’s still opportunity for us over there. But until we know who we’re running against, it’s hard to handicap that race until we have the opportunity to do the things that we need to do.
There’s districts like Michigan’s 8th Congressional District, where a guy who dropped out on the Republican side about a month ago won the primary over a Trump-endorsed nominee who had run a real campaign, because MAGA voters weren’t going to vote for that guy—for whatever reason they decided not to vote for him, and I think we could probably guess why.
And the map is continuing to shift pretty rapidly due to external events. So it’s just hard to say, the first week of August, where we think September’s going to look like and what do we think October’s going to look like.
Sargent: So right now Dems lead in the House generic ballot matchup by around six or seven points, depending on which set of averages you use. That strikes me as not big enough. It would be big enough to win the House, but not by what I think we’d like to see, not by the big margins we’d like to see, and it certainly wouldn’t be enough to get you the Senate.
Do you guys regard six or seven points in the generic ballot matchup as big enough? And where do you expect it to be after September and October and early November?
Shah: I think it is big enough, because it represents a roughly eight- to nine-point shift from 2024, right? We lost the House in 2024 by what, 6,000 votes spread out across a handful of districts. An eight-point shift not only sweeps us to victory in a lot of those coin-flip places, but it puts all these second-tier places in play too.
It’s also—despite the fact that we’re only 90 days out from election day, we’re still early. A lot of these campaigns have not really begun in earnest, particularly in the House, where the races are a lot smaller than these Senate races, and you don’t start communicating until September and litigating your case against the Republican incumbent or the Republican challenger in earnest until September.
I do think you will see a pretty dramatic shift come mid- to late September in the generic ballot. If you do not, that doesn’t worry me, because the generic ballot in a lot of these polls—I do think that people are still, by design or not, potentially building out samples that are still a little conservative. And I think that pollsters don’t want to be wrong in the wrong direction, right?
So they’re making their data potentially a little more conservative than it ought to be, because they don’t want to bet on being too aggressive and too optimistic for the Democrats and be wrong. It’s easier to say, “Oh, we actually won by a lot, not just by a little,” and I think you will start to see those models and those screens start to shift a little bit as we get into September as well.
But I think we are where we want to be. The trajectory that we’re on is the most important thing, and that feels good. And I think that once these races really start to get litigated in September, particularly in these tier-two, tier-three races that haven’t seen robust campaigns in recent years at the House level, that’s when you’ll start to have a better understanding of the trajectory and the environment in which we’re operating in 2026.
Sargent: You guys are polling a lot. House Majority PAC has released a lot of its internal polls, so I’m going to ask you a question about the polling. Right now, in HMP polling, are Dem candidates leading in enough districts—in a number of districts that’s sizably larger than the handful of seats that Dems need to flip to win the House? In other words, are Dems up in a big enough bloc of districts in your polling that you have a real cushion over what you need to get?
Shah: As of now, we are.
Sargent: OK. How many?
Shah: Oh, God, I don’t have all our polls memorized. But if the election were today, we would take back the House, yes.
Sargent: All right. So it sounds like you guys think you’re on this trajectory to win the House. You said that if it’s a national advantage of six or seven points in the generic ballot matchup, you guys would win the House. Like, how big a margin would six or seven points get you, though?
As far as I can tell, a lot of the analysis shows that because of the redistricting successes, the gerrymandering successes that Republicans had, Dems need to win the House national ballot by three points just to take the House to begin with. If you get to six points or seven points, which is where it is now, roughly how many seats are we talking about flipping here?
Shah: You need to also remember, though, that the way that this gerrymander has taken place in places, particularly in Texas—they were relying on Trump 2024 numbers to draw those maps. That might be where you find that Republicans made the biggest strategic error, because I think that they believed that they had a lock on the Latino vote in South Texas particularly, when in reality, the Latino vote, dating back to 2016 if not before, is the most swingy of swingy electoral blocs there is, right?
By definition, the Latino vote goes back and forth, and you have to fight for that vote. And so I don’t think that you can just take that calculus that you just described, where you’ve got to win by this number to do this, and this—it doesn’t account for those swings, I don’t believe.
And so I think that is where some folks are making a little bit of a miscalculation on where there is opportunity for us. You’ve seen us put out a poll last week in Texas 15 that says Pulido is winning over Congresswoman De La Cruz, and I think that is a real opportunity for us. That is a district that Trump won by double digits last time around, right? And so I just want to be clear on that.
I think it’s hard to give a number at the moment because I don’t have a comprehensive view of the battlefield just yet. I’m still polling in a lot of places. But I do feel like, if election day were today, you would see a margin for the House Democrats that’s north of 10 seats probably.
Sargent: Shripal, can you explain the strategy behind putting data centers in so many ads? It seems like Dems are looking for a villain who isn’t Trump. Am I right in saying that, and what’s the theory of the case here?
Shah: I don’t think it’s necessarily looking for a villain. I think it’s tapping into something that people are already mad about, which is their high electricity bills. You understand why people would be pissed off about that, because it plays into this larger argument about government corruption and people being on the take for their donors and stuff like that.
And it taps into the sentiment that Washington’s not looking out for these people, and they only care about their donors while I’m getting screwed. That’s the cost of the Republican corruption. And all of that together is a pretty solid argument to make, and you will see us do more and more on that over the next 90 days.
Sargent: All right, Shripal, just to circle back to where we started. Donald Trump is extremely unpopular. His base is falling apart. He’s losing MAGA voters on a number of different fronts. You guys are competing in a number of very Trumpy districts, in rural districts with a lot of Trump voters in them.
Do you really think that you can flip some of those, or is it just going to be, at the end of the day, the low-hanging fruit? What are you seeing in the Trumpy rural districts right now? Is there a genuine opportunity to finally make inroads with some of these voters that have been so hard for Democrats to get to? And if so, how is that happening?
Shah: I think there is a genuine opportunity. I think there is a genuine backlash and unhappiness at a high intensity with the way that Republicans, led by Donald Trump, have managed the country and managed to make things worse on the economy since getting into office about 18 months ago.
And I think for us, it is capitalizing on that with our own vision for how we would do things differently. And you are seeing candidates do that at scale, and will see candidates do that at further scale in September and October, and I think that’s where opportunities in some of these more traditionally red-leaning districts exist for 2026.
Sargent: Are you concerned about the Democratic brand? Is that holding back the ability to convert some of these voters or not?
Shah: I think that voters are generally unhappy with politicians across the board, and that is not new. I think where our opportunity lies is that a lot of the terrain is offensive terrain, where an individual candidate can run and create their own brand by communicating with the voter.
And they’re not running necessarily in these offensive opportunity districts on a brand that is rooted in Washington, D.C. And so that gives them opportunity to create their own brand, to communicate about their own agenda, and to articulate how they would serve and how they would do the job differently, and that’s where the opportunity comes to have the success in some of these places that you might not have otherwise.
Sargent: Shripal Shah, thanks so much for coming on, man. Good to see you. Appreciate it.
Shah: Appreciate it. Thank you so much.
Hence then, the article about transcript trump blurts out huge midterm weakness as maga cracks up 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 Blurts Out Huge Midterm Weakness as MAGA Cracks Up )
Also on site :
- Shoppers Can Comfortably Walk Miles In These $19 'Wide-Feet Friendly' Strappy Sandals With 'Great Arch Support'
- Dragon Power unleashed: Minesto's Tidal Energy Power Plant sets electricity production record over summer
- Zurich & El Gouna Film Festivals Strike Strategic Partnership Kicking Off With ‘Dolphins: My Close Encounters’