The following is a lightly edited transcript of the July 31 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.
Many are dismayed by the news that Texas Republicans released a new gerrymandered map designed to add five house seats. No question, it is terrible news, but we think part of it is about trying to psych us out; about trying to get Democrats and liberals to fear that future elections are unwinnable. What if the real story is that Trump is actually getting politically weaker and less popular? The Federal Reserve chairman just announced that interest rates will not be cut, defying Trump’s repeated explosions of rage at him. Trump fulminated wildly at Senator Chuck Grassley to speed up judicial nominations, insisting Democrats are laughing at Republicans—but Grassley doesn’t appear to be budging. Meanwhile, two new polls find Trump’s approval sinking to new lows and, on the economy, his approval’s cratering at exactly the moment when he’s set to announce that his tariffs are going into effect. MSNBC.com columnist James Downie has a new piece arguing that Democrats shouldn’t get overly spooked about the midterms right now, so we’re talking to him about all this. Good to see you, James.
James Downie: Good to be back with you.
Sargent: So let’s start here: Fed Chair Jerome Powell just announced that the Fed isn’t lowering interest rates. He said this.
Jerome Powell (audio voiceover): Increased tariffs are pushing up prices in some categories of goods. Near-term measures of inflation expectations have moved up on balance over the course of this year on news about tariffs as reflected in both market-based and survey-based measures.
Sargent: That comes just after Trump raged wildly in all caps on Truth Social that “POWELL MUST LOWER THE RATE.” He’s been raging along these lines for weeks. James, it seems like pretty bad timing for Trump that the Fed chair just said his tariffs are driving up prices, right when a bunch of tariffs are set to go into effect on August 1, which Trump is hailing as “Liberation Day.” Your reaction to all this?
Downie: Certainly poor timing for the president. I think it’s also worth noting that when Trump’s talking about lowering rates, he’s talking about lowering rates by multiple percentage points, which is well beyond whatever.… Even if he gets a Fed chair next year when Powell’s term ends, even if he gets a Fed chair who is more open to lowering rates, what Trump is talking about is something that would completely destabilize the economy. But yes, as Powell said, prices are certainly going up and there’s a reason why voters’ goodwill toward Trump when he came into office on prices is rapidly vanishing.
Sargent: Yeah, and the polls are showing just that. A new Reuters poll finds his approval overall sinking to 40 percent—his lowest yet—with 56 percent disapproving. He’s at 38 percent on the economy in the Reuters poll. Meanwhile, in the new Economist/YouGov poll, his approval is at 40 percent with 55 percent disapproving. There, he’s at 40 percent on the economy and jobs. And I feel compelled to point out, James, that this is before all the tariffs go fully into effect. There’s no reason—absolutely none—given the way all these dynamics are playing out, to assume that gets better for Trump. It seems likely to get worse. Prices will probably go up more, and no one will see any benefits from these tariffs—probably because there aren’t any and there won’t be any benefits. Your thoughts on these dynamics?
Downie: Yeah, absolutely. The prices are going to continue to be a problem for him as it goes forward. We’re, after a couple of months of growing evidence under the radar that it would be pushing up prices, we’re starting to see more and more of that. And there’s no reason to think that there’s going to be any relief on the horizon anytime soon. And Trump has said, I’m going to keep going forward with the trade policy. He seems to think it’s winning. There’s no evidence to suggest that anyone around him is going to tell the emperor he has no clothes. So there’s every reason to expect that it’s going to continue to be a problem for him.
Sargent: Well, you wrote in this piece that Democrats shouldn’t worry too much about their really low approval ratings. We’ve seen some polls lately that do have Democrats in the toilet, but you pointed out that a big part of that is that Democratic respondents are disapproving. And that’s something that can be improved by fighting Trump harder. Can you recap that argument for us?
Downie: Yeah, absolutely. The comparison I make in the piece is that it’s similar to—for those who remember the fight around Obamacare—when Obamacare was polled, you would get polls saying, Oh, this is unpopular. People don’t like this. But when you drill down, quite often a chunk of the disapproval of Obamacare was people saying the law didn’t go far enough. And when Republicans thought, Oh, we’re going to run on Obamacare in 2012 and Obama’s going to be a one-term president, that didn’t work out—because the people who thought Obamacare didn’t go far enough, they didn’t want to vote Republican.
And that explains why, whether it’s NBC, CBS, the latest is The Wall Street Journal poll, you find that the favorability for the Democratic Party is at its worst in over 30 years in all three of those polls. But at the same time, Democrats are leading the generic congressional ballot in those polls, in the CNN poll. Seventy-two percent of Democrats are already very enthusiastic about voting in the midterms, which is 22 percent higher than Republicans. Democrats continue to do incredibly well in special elections. These are all signs that Democratic voters don’t approve of what the party as an institution is doing but they’re not going to vote for Republicans—and they are still enthusiastic about voting against Trump.
Sargent: Yes, and absolutely they are going to vote. The approval of the party and favorability of the party is just one number. There are a whole bunch of other things, including fundamentals, which involve things that we already know about how elections work. And we know that midterms favor the out party for all the reasons that you went into. So it’s just profoundly bizarre for people to fixate on that one number when the generic ballot is showing Dems up. The disapproval of the party or unfavorability of the party doesn’t even figure in in that sense. Weird to me.
Downie: I think a lot of it is a function, unfortunately, of certain rhythms of how the view-from-nowhere media coverage takes political news. It is not news that Donald Trump is unpopular. It is not news that the party that holds the White House will probably lose seats in the midterms. And so they are going to look for polling findings that cut against that. That is, unfortunately, to a lot of reporters more interesting, or that is more worth pushing, even when there’s a bunch of other evidence pointing in the other direction—that this will not be an abnormal midterm.
Sargent: Yes, it seems like a lot of basic structural factors about our politics are asserting themselves. And one thing that I think contributes to the weird pathology among Dems when they freak out in situations like this is that they don’t believe on some level that the fundamentals apply to Trump. They think Trump has somehow defied all the rules of politics. This is what Democrats have to do: internalize this thought that Trump is not an exception to the rules. He does not have superpowers. He’s vulnerable right now, and he’s weak.
Downie: Absolutely. I think that a good example would be immigration, where that was perceived as a strength of Trump’s—in fact, the strength of Trump’s—coming into his presidency. And when you look at the polling and you look at Trump’s approval ratings and immigration, it started going down when Democrats started challenging him on it. It started going down when they made people like Kilmar Abrego Garcia … they put him in the news. And that was an area where action and confrontation worked to Democrats’ advantage, even on an issue that is relatively strong for the president. And I think, unfortunately, there are a lot of Democrats who, as you said, think that Trump is immune from the laws of political gravity when, really, he has never been an especially popular president.
Sargent: It’s really important that you said that. I want to bring out another number here from the Reuters/Ipsos poll. They have Trump’s approval on immigration at 43 percent with 51 percent disapproving. A whole bunch of other polls have found Trump deeply underwater on immigration—again, his strongest issue. Gallup had him in the high 30s on this issue. And that is the perfect example of how Democrats psych themselves out of making good arguments. This is an area where Democrats told themselves, We’ve lost the argument. He’s unassailable on immigration. He’s won the argument. So as a result, they don’t take him on on it. And then as you say, when a few Democrats stick their damn necks out and do some stuff like Chris Van Hollen, the Senator from Maryland, going down to El Salvador, it brings his approval down. And they cannot seem to get this through their heads that they can win on an issue like this; that Trump is the person in power. He’s the one who’s held responsible for all the awful shit that’s happening. They’ve got to get their head straight on that.
Downie: I think that if they don’t get it together—if the Democratic leadership doesn’t get their act together—then the party’s base is going to let them know about it. And I think it could be very interesting in terms of how that shakes out in terms of primaries. In terms of the polls that have shown poor favorability for the Democratic Party, you find again and again that Democrats are saying, We don’t want compromise. We want you to stand by your values. There was one poll, for example—I think it was a Reuters poll—that had 62 percent of Democrats want leadership replaced already. And obviously, if there’s a disappointing midterm, that number would only increase. I think that the base of the party has been very clear about the strategy that they want leadership to take. I think that, again, particularly if the midterms are disappointing, I believe that 2026, 2027, 2028 are going to be very, very fractious times for Democratic incumbents.
Sargent: Oh my God, it sounds terrible, man, the way you’re talking about it. Look, Trump is meanwhile raging in all directions—other directions as well. He flipped out on Truth Social saying that Senator Grassley, who’s the GOP chair of the Judiciary Committee, that he damn well better get rid of the blue slip process, which allows home-state senators to put holds on nominees. “He should do this, IMMEDIATELY, and not let the Democrats laugh at him,” Trump said. But Grassley doesn’t appear to be moving on this. There are certain things GOP senators won’t do, no matter how wildly Trump rages at them. What do you make of that?
Downie: I think that this is one area where Democrats have been a little better than maybe some of their biggest critics have given them credit for, in terms of the pace of nominations. In the Senate, I believe they have not let any nominees be confirmed by unanimous consent. Senate Majority Leader Thune wants to come up with some package to let the Senate go on recess so they can go home and defend their votes for the “big, beautiful bill,” which incidentally suggests not great things about the bill—but anyway. So I think that this is a consequence of Democrats making some efforts to throw sand in the gears of the Trump administration trying to get some things confirmed. But the big test is going to come with the government funding fights later this year with the possible shutdown and those sorts of debates.
I think everyone can agree that whatever your view was of how Democrats should have played the last funding fight, it didn’t seem like they had a strategy at all until the very last second. So how they handle that, I think, will be the real test for how the base sees how much fight the Senate side of things is showing.
Sargent: Yeah, for sure. And my God, they really have to be paying attention to what Trump’s numbers are actually showing when they chart out that strategy—and ditch this idea of Trump as all powerful and [being] possessed of magical powers and so forth. Just to close out with redistricting, the news is out that Texas Republicans have put out a new map that would gain them five seats. It looks like the Democrats will have to do something in response, but where? The pressure is going to have to go up for it to happen in California, right? What do you think of the whole redistricting debate? I think there’s an element of trying to spook us and put some fear into us: essentially make us think that they really have rigged the system in such a foolproof way that there’s just no point in competing.
Downie: Yeah, I think that’s certainly part of it. Trump is also looking for any lever he can to prevent the House, prevent the Judiciary Committee, the Oversight Committee, those sorts of committees from having subpoena power to conduct hearings and so forth. In terms of where it’s most likely, I think that California, yeah, [is] certainly most likely, especially in terms of the number of seats that they could maybe free up. Obviously, there are some hurdles there in terms of a redistricting commission and getting around that. The difficulty for Democrats, in short, is that there aren’t as many states with Democratic governors and state legislatures, and those that do have those more of them are already heavily Democratic in their congressional makeup. So there are fewer seats that you can just basically recalibrate the maps to find. But I do think, though, that even if you add five seats, it’s still a fairly small margin for the Republicans. Right now, we’re talking [about], before vacancies are filled, a couple of seats. You add five seats; that’s still less than 10. And many, many midterms have seen—more midterms than not—have seen the party not in control of the White House take double-digit seats in the House. So yeah, certainly, I think Trump is scared. He doesn’t want the House to be able to investigate him, and he’ll do anything he can. But that doesn’t mean that Democrats should be cowed by it.
Sargent: At the end of the day, I think Democrats are going to realize that they’re going to have to fight fire with fire here and do what they have to do in whatever state that they can. This is an area where they shouldn’t count on the fundamentals to give them 40 seats or whatever and should treat this as an absolute dogfight for every inch of territory—yet at the same time, keeping in mind that Trump is weak, that all the fundamentals are working against them so that they don’t hamstring themselves in other ways. It’s a bit of a delicate balancing act. I feel like Democrats are feeling their way toward the right position. What do you think?
Downie: I think that they’re getting there. Again, as we talked about earlier, the base is already there. In the NBC poll, it flipped from … in 2017, one-third of Democratic voters said they prefer Democratic lawmakers to hold to their principles and not compromise with Trump, and now it’s two-thirds saying that. And the closer we get to 2028 and the more you have ambitious—particularly—governors but also some senators and representatives, the more you have some of these very ambitious folks attracting more and more attention. They know what the base wants, and they’re going to start showing more and more fight.
Sargent: Absolutely critical point. You’re seeing that with Gavin Newsom. He’s adopting a pretty powerful posture against Trump. I have a feeling he’s got his eyes on the ’28 primaries, James. I think you are going to see a lot of these other folks come out of the woodwork who are looking at running, and it’ll be harder and harder for Democrats to adopt the less aggressive posture. James Downie, thanks so much for talking to us today man. Really helpful stuff.
Downie: Thanks for having me.