The following is a lightly edited transcript of the October 9 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.
Donald Trump has been ranting like crazy on Truth Social about elections over the last couple days. He raged at Senator Lisa Murkowski, fumed about imaginary voter fraud in the coming midterms, and seethed that the Brazilian election was rigged.
We think it’s not a coincidence that this is happening even as we’re now seeing early voting data emerge, and it really doesn’t look good for Republicans. In fact, we’re seeing a number of MAGA data analysts who are warning of a bad election based on this right now.
So is this panic justified? We’re talking to Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg, because he’s been closely following the early voting on his Hopium Chronicles Substack. Simon, thanks for coming on.
Simon Rosenberg: Greg, it’s always a pleasure.
Sargent: Good to see you, Simon. So Trump has been raging a lot lately. He seethed at Lisa Murkowski, who objected to his effort to sue to block the election if the GOP loses in Alaska. Trump said this:
“The Republicans’ worst senator by far is Lisa Murkowski of the great state of Alaska. The Democrats are trying to steal this important Republican seat, and if that happens, everything we’ve done for Alaska will come to an immediate halt!”
Simon, it does look like Democrats are a hair up, but it is on a knife’s edge. I’ve got to think that if Democrats win Alaska, they’re probably winning the Senate. And that’s why he’s panicking about it. What do you think?
Rosenberg: Yeah, look, he’s had a really bad few weeks. You know, the inflation reports were terrible. The jobs report was terrible. Brent crude is up at $115 a barrel today, right? The Middle East war is getting worse. I mean, nothing has gone right for him in these final few weeks before the election.
And we’ve seen it play out in the polling. I mean, the last round of polling that was done by the New York Times and everybody else, every single one of the articles said he hit a new low. The generic ballot was at plus 11 for us on average. So the battlefield underneath him has deteriorated in the last few weeks. And I think they are legitimately now starting to panic.
Sargent: Well, Trump also had this insane tweet where he said this: “Anybody reporting voter fraud in the past elections or the upcoming 2026 midterm election will be paid one million dollars upon the arrest and conviction of those that created the fraud!”
So if you’re Donald Trump and you think that millions and millions and millions of people are voting illegally, that means he’s going to pay out a shitload of money, isn’t he?
Rosenberg: Yeah. I mean, look, and his performance on the stump has been erratic. He looks terrible. I mean, he’s bloated, and even the makeup is not helping him. The MAGAs just got their butts kicked in Serbia and Brazil.
You know, and the other thing, Greg, that I just don’t think has gotten enough coverage is, there’s just been an incredible amount of bad news spinning out of the White House. Infighting, people getting fired.
It feels like they’re closing with chaos instead of with strength. And you’re starting to see it in how they’re approaching the final ad spend in the race, and also what they’re doing with his time. I think they are in a form of panic now.
Sargent: Correct. And I do think this is related to the early voting figures we’re seeing now. We’re going to stress, this early voting is not necessarily predictive, and we’ll get into that. But some MAGA figures are now panicking about the election, particularly the early vote.
One of these people is Jennica Pounds, who’s a big MAGA account that goes under the name Data Republican. She posted this: “I’ve been asked about early voting analysis. The dilemma I have is that my platform is big enough that being too blunt can affect morale.”
She then said she won’t announce the numbers on X, adding: “You must turn out and bring friends and brace yourself on election night. Even Texas is going to be a fight.” Big credit to The Bulwark’s Will Sommer for catching this.
Simon, there you have it. If she puts up the actual early voting data, it’ll depress morale too much on the right. Your thoughts on that?
Rosenberg: Yeah, look, I mean, there are a handful of states where the numbers are incredible for us right now. North Carolina and Georgia and Texas, for example, and Kansas and Indiana and Nebraska and New Mexico. I mean, we’re seeing real wave numbers, right, in these early votes.
And so I think that the Texas numbers have been a collective shock for them, you know, for all of the sort of right-wing data people. And also the North Carolina and Georgia numbers. As we get more early in-person voting in, they’re getting more pessimistic.
Sargent: OK. So let’s walk through the early voting data as of today, Monday afternoon. Simon, how many states are we getting early voting data out of right now?
Rosenberg: Well, we’re over 40 now, Greg. So most of the country is now in some form of early voting. And tens of millions of people have voted, and tens of millions more will vote between now and Election Day.
Sargent: So we’ve got 40 states right now reporting early voting data. This includes a number of states with big Senate races. How many people as of now have voted early in total nationwide?
Rosenberg: So in the latest TargetEarly data today, 27 million have voted, which is about four million more than had voted at this point four years ago. So turnout is up, which is a sign of intensity, which is a good sign for us.
Sargent: OK. So 27 million people have voted early as of right now. We think 53 percent of the early vote is Democratic, correct?
Rosenberg: Yeah, and 39 percent Republican. So this is a good number, and we should be happy with that number, in part because we’ve seen turnout come up so much since 2022.
Sargent: OK, so 53 to 39, Democrat to Republican. What was the partisan breakdown in 2024?
Rosenberg: At this point it was 47-44. So we only had a three-point lead. And this time, as you were saying earlier, we have a 14-point lead. So we’re doing about 11 points better than we were at this time in 2024.
Sargent: Right now we’ve got an early voting electorate that’s 11 points more Democratic than the one in 2024, right?
Rosenberg: Yep. Greg, the most significant data we have in the early vote so far, the stuff that means the most, I think, about where this election is going, is that we’ve seen a big surge compared to 2022 among the voters in our coalition. So Black voters are voting at a rate 10 percent higher. Eighteen-to-29-year-olds are up 25 percent compared to this point in 2022, and Hispanic-Latino voters are up 41 percent.
And the overall electorate—at this point in 2022, the electorate was 75 percent white. Today it’s 70 percent white. These are huge shifts compared to the electorate that showed up in 2022. And remember that we’re also doing better with all these demographic groups, in terms of their Democrat-Republican vote, than we were in 2022.
So not only are they voting in much larger numbers, they’re going to vote much more Democratic. And so this is a very encouraging sign about what’s going to happen all across the country in the election in 2026.
Sargent: Just to clarify for people, when you say that Hispanics are up 41 percent relative to 2022, what you mean is that the share of the early vote as of now is that much higher among Hispanics than it was in 2022.
Rosenberg: You’re seeing a really incredible surge of Hispanic voters, and it’s everywhere. I mean, it’s not just in Texas and California. It’s in every state that we have data.
If I can just read a couple of examples to this, Greg, just to give people a flavor. The Hispanic vote share is 35 percent higher in Texas, 44 percent in California, 15 percent in Arizona, 25 percent in New Mexico, 35 percent in Colorado, 51 percent in Illinois, 84 percent in Virginia, 70 percent higher in New York, 45 percent higher in Nevada, 59 percent in New Jersey, 58 percent in Georgia.
So what all that means is that this is a universal trend. It’s not surprising, frankly, given how Trump and Stephen Miller have disproportionately targeted Hispanic families and families in Hispanic communities, his dismal treatment of people in Latin America during his time, and his desire to become viceroy of Latin America.
And so, to me, this is a very significant event. And it’s one of the reasons that places like Texas are so competitive. Because the old line is, this is waking a sleeping giant. Well, Donald Trump sure looks like he’s woken a sleeping giant here in our politics.
Sargent: That’s really fascinating, the treatment of Latin America being a big contributor to this. And I think that will be a big narrative coming out of this as well.
You brought up the fact that the white vote is kind of declining as a share of the early vote right now. And in fact, that’s one of the things that’s inspiring this MAGA panic. This MAGA pollster Rich Baris put it very well. Here he’s talking on OAN about the early vote in North Carolina. Listen to this.
Rich Baris (voiceover): The Black vote share, and increasingly Hispanic too in North Carolina, is typically not this much of the early vote. And I love this about the southern states, because we have a larger group of subgroups, you know, including Black and Hispanic voters. We’re looking at potentially a pretty low white vote share. We do expect that to get more Republican as time goes on, but Republicans are running significantly behind where they are. And a big part of that is not only that Black vote share is almost double what it has been in the past as of right now, but—this is where Republicans really need to step it up.
Sargent: So here Rich Baris is treating North Carolina as a sort of baseline for other states. In other words, he’s seeing this happening nationally. And Rich Baris has also elsewhere agreed with an interviewer who said that Republicans are facing, quote-unquote, disaster.
Simon, it does look like the declining white share of the early vote is an important story, doesn’t it?
Rosenberg: Yeah, and it’s because it’s big, you know. I mean, these are big movements. A movement of, you know, five points in a demographic group is a sizable movement. We’re seeing 10, 25, 41 point shifts among parts of the electorate, and two of these groups had swung to Trump, right, in 2024. And certainly I think one of the stories is, there may be no groups that are feeling more betrayed by him than the ones that loaned their vote to him in ‘24, right?
And so I do think that the electorate is younger. There are far more people of color in it than in 2022. This is all very encouraging stuff. But yes, what we would have wanted, and what would have been righteous and just, would have been for voters of color to have turned out in large numbers as a way of punishing Trump for his rancid white supremacy. And we may be seeing that play out now all across the country.
Sargent: Well, another MAGA data guy, Mark Mitchell, had a really interesting tweet. More panic here. He was responding to someone who pointed out on X that Trump’s campaigning right now isn’t working.
This person pointed out that Trump is not a good closer and should have just stayed in the White House. So this MAGA data guy, Mark Mitchell, said this in response: “Good pollsters knew this would happen instinctually. Guess none of the highly paid ones had the balls to tell Trump.” Close quote.
Simon, that’s harsh stuff. It is a big story right now that Trump just isn’t anything like what he used to be with his voters. It’s also just obviously true that his pollsters didn’t have the guts to tell him this, right?
Rosenberg: I have a slightly different take. I think they did tell him. I think that in his vainglory and his arrogance and his addled state, he just always believed that judgment would not come. The reckoning would not come. They would spend their way out of it. Democrats are weak and pathetic, that he couldn’t lose to Schumer and Jeffries.
He had all these things in his head, right? You know, the war would be resolved and gas prices would go down. He had all these scenarios in his head where what is happening wasn’t going to happen. And it didn’t happen that way.
And he’s now closing out the election campaigning and spending money in places like South Carolina and Mississippi, you know, and the House battlefield continues to erode. And because, Greg, what happens in a wave election like this is that it’s almost inevitable that the party in power sees the election turn against them by a few points at the end. And that’s exactly what’s happening.
And I agree with the MAGA commentator that his campaigning isn’t helping him. He’s saying crazy stuff on the stump. He’s generating negative news. He’s not closing with a positive, strong message for them. And in fact, in the D.C. political press, in Politico and other places, the amount of griping about how crappy Trump has been on the stump and how much trouble he’s causing them has been kind of shocking, to be honest. They know they’re in a lot of trouble, and they know that he’s not going to be able to save them. And they thought they had a firewall with all this additional money they had, and it’s proving not to be the case.
Sargent: It absolutely is remarkable, the leaking about Trump at this point and the level of rage among Republicans at Donald Trump right now. But on the other hand, screw you, Republicans. You brought this on yourselves, right?
That aside, Simon, I want to pour cold water all over everything we’re saying right now, in this way. All right, look, here’s the thing. Like, the House looks like it’s probably a foregone conclusion. Anything can happen, of course, but it does look as if Democrats are pretty much certain to take the House. The Senate, on the other hand, not at all certain, right?
OK, so Democrats are, you know, in the polling average, they’re maybe a point or two up in every one of these races. Like, if you had told me six months ago that that was going to happen, I wouldn’t have believed it. And it’s pretty amazing that they’re up a point or two in races like the one in Texas, the one in Ohio, the one in Alaska.
But the thing about this is that all these races are touch and go. They’re incredibly close. And it’s really not hard to see all of them going against Democrats, really, or maybe enough of them going against Democrats that you guys fall short of the four that you need to flip. I mean, that’s the thing. So tell me why I shouldn’t necessarily place too much stock in the early vote.
Rosenberg: No, I don’t think it’s throwing cold water. I think it’s reality. I think that these are all very close races. You know, they’re in very hard places for us to win. Many of these states, we have no recent history of performing well.
We don’t have the kind of infrastructure underneath us in many of these places that allows us to close with the kind of strength that we would have in places like Georgia and North Carolina, where there’s more historic infrastructure there. And we have very little history of winning in places like Kansas and Alaska and Iowa and Ohio and Texas. We haven’t won a statewide race in Texas in 32 years.
So I think you’re not throwing cold water. You’re giving an accurate picture. Final point, Greg, is that what you’re getting at is the reality that we are being outspent in these Senate races by astronomical numbers, unprecedented numbers. There’s just a worry that we don’t really know what will happen because of that, because we’ve never actually gone through an election like this.
And so I think the sort of prudence that the Senate campaign people have shown has been appropriate, given just the outrageous levels of money and how much we’re being grossly outspent in all these races.
But I just interviewed Adam Hamilton today. The early vote in Kansas is through the roof for us. He told us today that he was at an event in Pratt, in a red part of Kansas. A group of farmers came up to him and complained about the tariffs and the fertilizer costs. He said this state is going to go blue.
I think let’s just hope, fingers crossed, right, that things break our way in these final eight days, that the trends are going in the right direction, and that we close and we win this thing in the Senate. But you’re right. I mean, could we fall a little bit short in these Senate races? Of course we could. I mean, these are very close races in places that we just don’t have a lot of history of doing well in. But I’m very encouraged about where we are, and we’ve got to put our heads down and do everything we can to push this thing towards us in the last eight days.
Sargent: You mentioned this in passing, so I just want to highlight it before we say goodbye. Donald Trump later this week is campaigning in, yep, South Carolina. And that sure says something about where they think the election is.
Rosenberg: They’re spending money, Greg, in this final week in Nebraska, in Kansas, in Mississippi and South Carolina. You know, in a campaign at the end, you can tell where their strategy is based on where the candidate goes and where they’re spending money. The candidate’s going to be in South Carolina twice in the last two weeks. He’s going to Mississippi. This is the sign of an eroding, deteriorating battlefield, not a positive development for them.
And so we should take that to heart, but we can’t take our—you know, we’ve got to keep our pedal to the metal and run through the tape, close strong, all those, you know, things. Because as my friend Anderson Clayton said, elections may be decided in November, but they’re won in October. And we just have to do everything we can now to close strong and run up the score and win this thing next week.
Sargent: Simon Rosenberg, best of luck to all of you. Thanks so much for coming on. Always a great pleasure to talk to you.
Rosenberg: Thanks, Greg. Always fun.
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