The following is a lightly edited transcript of the October 20 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.
We’ve got tons of new developments in the battle for Congress. New polls show Donald Trump cratering and the Democratic lead growing. The GOP leaks of panic are growing more humiliating for the president. And Trumpworld is responding to all this in a way that some Republicans call shocking.
We think all signs are that Trump and his aides are already planning to blame a big loss on everyone but him, and we think that would be bad for the country in terms of what’s coming next. So we hope Democrats won’t let them get away with that.
We’re talking about all of it with Madison Andrus, a senior operative overseeing House races for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. She’s got some new polling to share as well. Madison, thanks for coming on.
Madison Andrus: Thanks for having me Greg. It’s really great to be back on again.
Sargent: Well, the new Washington Post poll has Trump’s approval at a record low of 33 percent, with 66 percent disapproving. The Post has Democrats leading in the generic ballot matchup by eight points, 52 to 44. The new NBC poll finds Trump’s approval at 34 percent and Democrats leading in the generic matchup by 10 points, 55 to 45.
Madison, it’s clear that Trump’s approval is now dropping into the low 30s, and the Democratic lead in the generic ballot matchup is growing. Do you think Democrats are up by 10 points in the generic matchup right now?
Andrus: We are seeing in Trump plus 10 districts all across the country that Democrats are either leading or well within striking distance. You know, looking over to North Carolina with Jamie Ager just an incredibly well-run campaign with a great candidate who’s a part of his community, and in a Trump plus 10 district. And we are feeling really good and confident about our odds there.
And so I think that there are a lot of districts all across the country, you know, that we’ve had on our map for months and months, if not years. And people thought we were crazy to kind of be going into these traditionally red areas and red districts. And now we are just a couple of weeks away from the election, and we see that it’s really paying off.
Sargent: I want to come back to that, but let’s talk about Jamie Ager in North Carolina’s 11th district for a second. It’s one of the ones I’m really watching closely. This is in western North Carolina, the western tip.
It’s in Appalachia. This is really heavy-duty Trump country. It does have Asheville, but it’s very rural in a lot of stretches. And like I say, Appalachia, Trump country. This is a place where you guys really think you’re going to win.
Andrus: Yeah, we feel very good about what is happening in western North Carolina. Just a couple of days ago, there was a huge, huge rally that Jamie Ager put on in North Carolina 11. Over 3,000 people came out to see and hear from Jamie Ager.
JD Vance is actually in that district today, and judging from the photos that I saw, he could barely pull together 30 people to come and see him.
Sargent: Well, that’s pretty striking that they’re sending JD Vance to North Carolina’s 11th district.
Let’s talk about some of these Republican leaks. They’re really off the charts now. Republicans leaked to Politico that there’s a new level of panic over their internal polling in the House races. A growing number of Republicans blame Trump directly for this situation.
And one House Republican blames GOP leaders for being too slow to deliver reinforcements to safer seats that are now at risk. This Republican says: “The leadership at the NRCC is living in a bubble. We’re getting killed out here.” The NRCC is, for folks who don’t know, the counterpart to the DCCC.
Madison, that strikes me as interesting. Has there been, like, a sudden deterioration in these safer seats? Can you give us a few examples of where you’re seeing that, if you are?
Andrus: I don’t think that this is a sudden deterioration. It feels like Republicans have just finally opened their eyes to what folks all across the country are feeling. They started out this cycle by gutting Medicaid, by nearly a trillion dollars cutting Medicaid. They are cutting food assistance benefits, they’re backing this war in Iran.
Gas prices are up all over the country, diesel fuel hitting over $6 in many parts. You know, this is the reality that working families in America have been facing for over a year now. This is not a sudden shift. It just feels like finally, when they are actually staring down their election, they’re finally waking up, and it’s just too late.
Sargent: What are some of these districts that are really on the outer tiers looking like? I mean, these are places maybe where they haven’t really been on people’s radar at all, but now that Trump is just continually deteriorating the way he is, all of a sudden these outer-tier places are within play. Can you talk about a few places like that?
Andrus: Yeah, we talked about North Carolina 11, but we’re seeing it in so many other places. Kind of bringing us back down to Texas, in Texas 15 with Bobby Pulido against Monica De La Cruz—everybody’s been really talking about Bobby Pulido for a while, but folks were really questioning if a Democrat could win in this district that Trump won by a fairly large margin.
And what we’ve seen in the last two weeks is, absolutely he can. And even Monica knows this. When Mike Johnson was there just a couple of days ago, Monica was begging people not to believe the polls, because even their numbers are that bad for them.
We’re seeing over in Florida 25 with Jared Moskowitz against Scott Singer, Republicans are having to dump tens of millions of dollars into a district that was supposed to be an easy pickup for them. And so I think what we’ve clearly seen is that these gerrymandering attempts have backfired. And as we get closer and closer to Election Day, we are just seeing Republican chances in these districts absolutely crater.
Sargent: Well, there’s another development involving money. One Republican operative tells Politico this: “No one in the world expected that the Senate would need as much money as they did. All of this money that was expected to go to the House for the most part is now being wasted on the Senate because they fucked up so bad.”
So Madison, there you have it. House Republicans blaming Senate counterparts for overconfidence and sucking up the resources they want. But what I don’t get about this, and maybe you can shed light here, is, aren’t House Republicans currently outspending House Democrats right now, when you put together the candidates’ war chests with the national group spending? What’s the situation there?
Andrus: Look, there’s no doubt that there is a ton of money flying around everywhere. And that was what people had said about Republicans pretty much this entire cycle, is that they’ve got this huge war chest and they’ve got all this money.
And what we’ve seen in the last couple of weeks is that, you know, there’s a few things that money can’t fully buy. And we’re seeing that elections are one of them, when people are in just such a rough spot economically. Any money that they are pouring in is not actually changing the fact of the matter on the ground.
Sargent: Right. Although I will say, I pick up some angst from Democrats about the money. What I tend to hear from Democrats is that Republicans are spending so much now, like with Elon Musk’s millions, MAGA Inc.’s millions. They kind of say this is really uncharted territory, like no one feels confident about what the results will be of all the spending, because it’s just such a crazy amount. Is that an unreasonable fear?
Andrus: Yeah, I mean, we are not taking any of this for granted. Very recently we sent out a memo to donors saying that we wanted to make sure that we had the resources needed to fight, especially in kind of some of these outer districts, like in Florida 7 and in North Carolina 9.
And so we are still, you know, 15 days out from the election. We are still raising money to make sure that we are putting all of our candidates, all of our incumbents, in the best spot possible for November.
Sargent: So here’s something else that’s remarkable as well. Trump’s super PAC officials are now telling Politico that they can’t really help embattled Republican incumbents and candidates all that much.
These officials are telling the Republican candidates that it’s on them to close on a positive message and tell voters what they will deliver to voters once they’re in office. This has left Republicans shocked, according to Politico.
So Madison, I mean, what’s surprising about this is how Trumpworld is just kind of washing its hands of the situation.
Andrus: They have not delivered in two years. As I mentioned, gas prices are up, the cost of health care is up, the Medicaid cuts endangered rural hospitals all over the country. They have no message on what they are going to deliver, because it has been a string of broken promises from day one with this Congress.
Sargent: Well, there’s more leaking coming from Republicans who are absolutely prepared to blame Trump. One GOP operative working on many races tells Politico: “He’s constantly been distracted and not focused on what the voters care about. It’s insane.”
That is really sort of a remarkable development that I don’t really know what might be a parallel in recent history—the degree to which Trump is just sort of out there, you know, talking about the ballroom, talking about his vanity projects, talking about what he’s doing next in the Capitol, a golf course now that he’s doing, and at the same time saying affordability’s a hoax and so forth.
But it sure looks to me like the situation that these Republicans are in, incumbents and candidates alike, is dictated wholly by the failures of Trump’s agenda, and that that’s just front and center in people’s minds. Right?
Like, so maybe they don’t pay close attention to Trump’s craziness day in and day out, but they are keenly aware that Trump is in charge, and that Trump is responsible for the situation in their daily lives. Is that something you see very clearly?
Andrus: That’s definitely something we’re seeing on the ground, is that voters are holding House Republicans responsible for co-signing this disastrous agenda that is just leading to higher costs across the board.
It’s higher prices at the grocery store, higher prices at the gas station, higher prices at the doctor’s office. And folks are really holding Republicans accountable for these failures of that agenda.
Sargent: So you have some new internal polling to share. This is in Texas’s 28th district, where Democratic Congressman Henry Cuellar is the incumbent. The new DCCC poll has Cuellar up by 54 to 34 over Republican challenger Tano Tijerina.
The poll has Trump’s approval at 34 percent to 57 percent disapproving. That’s 23 points underwater in a district that Trump carried in 2024 by over 10 points. Madison, is that what you found? And can you explain why you see it as significant?
Andrus: Yeah, these are just some really shocking and impressive numbers that we are seeing coming out of South Texas. And what’s interesting about this is that we’ve actually been hearing for months that Republican internal polling was showing some pretty equally horrendous numbers for them.
And putting all of this together and seeing these new numbers that we have, knowing that Republicans were seeing some pretty similar things, it really comes as no surprise why Republicans pulled out of this race and decided that they were no longer going to be funding Tano Tijerina’s campaign against Henry Cuellar, because they were just going to be flushing money down the toilet.
Sargent: Yeah, in fact, we should clarify that the Congressional Leadership Fund, which is, like, the leading Republican super PAC in the House races, recently pulled its funding, as Punchbowl News reported—pulled its funding out of this particular race.
This is a place that was a prize for Republicans, right? Like, they redrew Texas. They were aiming for Henry Cuellar’s district big time, right? And so that’s a real sign of how much stuff has shifted. Can you talk about that?
Andrus: Yeah. At the beginning of all of this, they were calling Tano Tijerina their star recruit. He was the best of the best that they had, that they were propping up in South Texas. And to just go from, this is our prized recruit, to pulling millions of dollars away from him—I think it goes to show exactly how much Republicans have failed, but also just how strong of a candidate Henry Cuellar is, and how strong of a representative he is.
He has brought billions of dollars back to his district. He’s been a leader on how Democrats are talking about immigration. And he’s one of the most well-known people in all of South Texas.
And so I think we are just starting to see, one, the pipe dream that Republicans were ever really going to take him on fall apart, but also this Texas dummymander. Like you said, Republicans drew these districts, redrew these South Texas districts, to try to flip these seats. And this was one of their prime targets, and we are already seeing complete and utter failure there.
Sargent: Yeah, I mean, a collapse of this magnitude in a place like that is striking. What’s going on in Texas’s 35th district? That’s another one. It’s a Democratic-held seat that Republicans redrew in hopes of winning, right? Like, what’s going on in that place?
Andrus: Yeah. So Texas 35, San Antonio area, that is basically a completely new district now, thanks to the Republican redraw. And we are still seeing really, really great signs coming out of Texas 35. You have the Democratic candidate there, Johnny Garcia, is a longtime sheriff’s deputy. He’s a law enforcement guy who has been a part of this community for years.
I think actually last time we talked, we talked about how I had actually just been down in South Texas with Johnny Garcia, and we were just walking around a couple of neighborhoods. And we stop by a house, and it’s a guy cleaning out his boat to go fishing later that afternoon or that weekend.
And he said to Johnny, I remember you from the sheriff’s office. I’ve never voted for a Democrat before in my life, but I’m voting for you this time.
Sargent: Striking stuff. What races do you predict Democrats will win in South Texas? Which districts?
Andrus: I think we are sweeping the South Texas districts. So that includes holding on to Texas 28 with Congressman Henry Cuellar, as well as Texas 34 with Congressman Vicente Gonzalez. And I think we’re flipping Texas 15. You know, Bobby Pulido is this once-in-a-generation candidate, an incredibly strong candidate for this community.
You just saw, he did the last concert of his career, and just the incredible crowd that came out to celebrate Bobby Pulido 15 days out from the election. The momentum down in South Texas is just something that’s been so incredible to see. And I think we are also going to take home Texas 35. This entire Texas redistricting is shaping up to be probably one of the most embarrassing dummymanders we’ve seen in a long time.
Sargent: Well, that would essentially mean that Democrats are going to win Texas’s 15th, Texas’s 28th, Texas’s 34th, Texas’s 35th. That would be quite a sweep. And that’s what you’re predicting. You’re going to win all.
Andrus: Yep. We are winning all of those.
Sargent: OK. Brass tacks. How many House seats at the end of the day, at the end of Election Day, how many do you think you’re going to end up with?
Andrus: I am not in the business of making those predictions. I’m bad at it. But no, I will tell you, we’re fighting every single day from now until November 3 for every single vote and every single district that we can.
Sargent: Madison Andrus, if you guys sweep South Texas, it’s going to be a seismic event. So I really hope to see it. Thanks so much for coming on. Really great to talk to you.
Andrus: It’s shaping up to be a good night on November 3.
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