The following is a lightly edited transcript of the November 6 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.
The sharp turn in Donald Trump’s political fortunes is a remarkable thing to behold. In Tuesday’s elections, Democrats won crushing victories across the board, making big inroads with working class voters, and handily winning the California referendum, which could result in five more Democratic House seats. There was much more like that. Trump’s response to all this was to blame everyone but himself. He rebuked Republican senators over the shutdown. He claimed that the losses were because he wasn’t on the ballot, and at one point he snapped at Republicans saying the party would be dead if it doesn’t end the filibuster to resolve the shutdown. Meanwhile, on still another front, Trump’s tariffs suddenly look as if they may lose before the Supreme Court. In sum, all the lawlessness and corruption ran smack into a big blue wave. But can that wave be sustained? We’re working through all of this with New Republic senior editor Alex Sheppard, has a good new piece digging into the anger of the Democratic base and what it means. Alex, good to have you on as always.
Alex Sheppard: It’s great to be back.
Sargent: So let’s just go through the top-line victories really quickly. Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill won the Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial races by 15 and 13 points—both big gains over four years ago. Democrats won trifectas in both state legislatures and large gains. Voters overwhelmingly passed Prop 50 in California. Democratic judges on the state Supreme Court in Pennsylvania held on—that was pretty dicey.
There’s much, much more like that. Alex, it’s standard for a party to do well in off-year elections when the opposition controls the White House. But can you talk about why this represents such a dramatic overperformance?
Sheppard: Yeah, I mean, I think that the situation in the country is really not great, right? In a lot of ways. But I think that, you know, more to the point that, you know, in a lot of ways, I think we—myself very much included—overthought the 2024 election in a lot of key ways, and that two things really matter here, right? One is that the Democrats, until the 11th hour, ran an 82-year-old candidate who people did not believe was capable of doing the job. And the other is that prices were really, really high, and that Trump said that he was going to bring those down.
And a year later, prices are even higher right now than they were. And people are recognizing that. And I think there are two parts of this victory. One is just the sort of general malaise that’s built around rising prices. And then there’s also sort of the specific anger within the Democratic base—and that’s focused on the authoritarian overreaches of this administration. It’s built around ICE agents sort of going into neighborhoods and kidnapping people. It’s based on a host of other things.
But I think what we’re seeing is that Democrats who harness that energy, who promise to center affordability in their politics, and who make fighting Donald Trump a priority—those people are winning everywhere.
Sargent: I want to get to all that in a bit, but let’s first talk about Trump’s response to all this at a breakfast with Senate Republicans on Wednesday. He blamed the shutdown. He cited pollsters who have pointed out that Trump wasn’t on the ballot and that this ended up depressing the MAGA base. He said, “I don’t know about that, but I was honored that they said that,” meaning he was honored because they said that all this happened because he wasn’t on the ballot.
And then on top of all that, Punchbowl’s Andrew Desiderio reported that after reporters were removed from the Senate lunch, Trump said that Republicans are “getting killed” in the shutdown and that the GOP will become a “dead party” if they don’t end the filibuster to resolve the shutdown. And then Trump even argued with Lindsey Graham after Graham pointed out, well, you know, we could use reconciliation to pass legislation and end the shutdown. Trump snapped at him saying, “Lindsey, you and I both know there’s so much you can’t do with reconciliation.” I think he meant there’s so much you can do, but point taken.
Anyway, Trump seems pretty ticked. What do you make of all that?
Sheppard: I mean, I think that in some ways he’s kind of right about him not being on the ballot. We have a lot of evidence right now that, you know, Republicans—particularly MAGA Republicans—do significantly worse when they don’t have Donald Trump at the top, sort of dragging them along. But the other thing to look at with these results is, everywhere you see—I mean, first off, you just say, look, there’s just a leftward shift everywhere. I think 99.8 percent of counties that voted on Tuesday shifted left.
Also, this idea of this new Trump coalition of sort of younger voters—younger men in particular, Blacks, Hispanics, Asian voters—that crumbled into dust completely. And so, you know, the frustration there is the sort of realization that this administration, that never had a mandate, frankly, and won a fairly narrow victory but has been acting like it did, is quickly realizing that the sort of momentum that they had to start this term has completely evaporated—that Democrats have all of the energy, that their base is activated, and Republicans aren’t.
And I think that, you know, Trump, for all of his flaws, I think understands a lot of pretty key and largely pretty simple things about American politics. And one of them is that you need to do concrete, tactile stuff. And I think that this speech, although very Trumpian, is him reminding his party that they need to get off their butts. But he’s a lame-duck president. And I think that we forget that because of all of the posturing from the White House—but he’s a lame duck. And that’s what we’re seeing right now.
Sargent: I think you made a critical point there, which is that the MAGA coalition turns out to be even more fragile than we thought. And that’s linked to your earlier point, which is that everybody overread the significance of 2024. Trump did make these inroads with non-white working-class voters. And that is a big problem for Democrats. The Democrats made plenty of mistakes. There’s no question. But the win wasn’t this durable shift among non-white working-class voters, they didn’t really move in some profound, durable sense towards Trump and the GOP, and we’re seeing that now, right?
Sheppard: Yeah, I mean, I think that one of the things that you saw in the last election is that when Trump said that he was going to lower prices, voters believed him—despite the fact that the Republican Party does not have a long track record of doing that. But when he said that he was going to violently deport millions of people from the United States, they didn’t, right? And I think that there was this—and they didn’t believe Democrats when they said it either.
And I think there’s been this recognition lately, right, that Trump has broken all of these promises, right? And I think that people are very angry, and many communities are very understandably anxious about this as well. But I think what you’ve seen is that Trump’s appeal to voters has always been rooted in the fact that he is different from other people. And I think that they then expect him to behave differently.
And we’ve seen this now, you know, really in three elections in which Trump has garnered a huge amount of votes from low-propensity voters—that people are willing to kind of believe that his singularity will allow him to cut through various Gordian knots. But once he gets into office, you see the way it works, and people recoil.
And I think that, you know—I mean, I joked yesterday that, like, the one takeaway from this election is just that this country is crazy, because all of this could have been foreseen, you know, a year and a half ago, you know, a year ago. But this is just where we are right now. And I think that what we’re seeing is that all of that—to go back to the first point we were talking about—all of this sort of hand-wringing and debating the Democrats have been doing about their identity, I think that still does need to happen.
But in the short term, it doesn’t matter. If you run on affordability and fighting back against this authoritarian administration, you’re going to do pretty well. You’re going to do well in New York City. You’re going to do well in Georgia. You’re going to do well in Pennsylvania. It doesn’t matter.
Sargent: One hundred percent, and we’ll get to that at the end. Let’s talk about Zohran Mamdani’s win relative to his performance in the primary. He made these big inroads with working-class voters who were initially more resistant to him—like Black and Latino voters. He ran up huge numbers in immigrant, working-class communities.
This was done with a campaign that focused on affordability and on attacking Trump. There’s been this sort of strange effort on the part of certain centrist pundits to try and take the Mamdani campaign and turn it into only an affordability campaign. And yes, affordability was absolutely central—it’s probably the key reason Mamdani won. He campaigned on it brilliantly. His social media strategy on it was brilliant.
But he also attacked Trump’s consolidation of authoritarian power and the ICE raids. And I don’t think that last part should get lost here. What do you think?
Sheppard: Yeah, I think that that’s absolutely right. And again, to go back to the sort of Trump point, I think one of the things that Mamdani did really effectively was channel the frustration that a lot of people have with the Democratic establishment into something positive. And I think attempts to sort of attack Mamdani—particularly for his stance on Israel—backfired in that regard, because it only served to remind voters who were, again, mad at normal Democrats that he was a different type of person.
The other thing that I think, on the affordability point, is that—I think one of the things that I thought has been funny about the way that this campaign has been covered—is that for all the talk of Mamdani being a communist, on the one hand, a lot of the advisors, a lot of the folks that I talk to, are fairly standard and familiar sort of YIMBY types. They’re very, very pro-abundance in a lot of ways. In a similar way, I think that—but I think the key distinction here is that a lot of moderates sort of look at these kind of heavily polled ideas and then they keep watering them down, right?
They say, like, oh, you know, there’s a sort of calibration here—we can run on all these kind of abstract ideas. And, you know, at the risk of going full Thomas Friedman, you know, I got into a yellow cab late last night, and they said, you know, “Mamdani won. Free buses.” And I was like, that’s political messaging, right? People want to know how policy affects their life in immediate and concrete ways.
And I think that one of the things that he did so effectively is take that kind of, you know, YIMBY-ish, this sort of activity that’s happening in the kind of center left, and transform it into stuff that feels really tactile and bold for people. And that made a huge difference when he was running against Andrew Cuomo, right? You have these other candidates, and they’re saying stuff, but you’re like, well, how is that going to change my life, right? If you’re somebody who takes the bus a lot, it turns out a free bus is at least probably $40 a week—it makes a big difference.
Sargent: Well, I will tell you that one of Mamdani’s senior advisors told me—for a piece that ran in The New Republic—that one of his innovations was the ability to use that type of appeal to reach immigrants who didn’t speak English as well. As this advisor put it to me, “Free buses and freeze the rent translates easily into a lot of languages.” That’s exactly what this advisor said to me.
And I thought that was a really interesting insight into how they’re doing this, which is that this kind of cost and affordability messaging dovetails very nicely with the fundamentally cosmopolitan orientation of the campaign as well. They did a ton of foreign-language media—really obscure stuff, too, really obscure outlets that most Americans won’t have ever heard of.
Sheppard: Yeah, I’ll have a piece that’s coming out either Thursday or Friday that’s more about this sort of messaging within this campaign itself. But I think that it’s really notable when you go back and look at the Harris campaign in particular—which I think did have a lot of interesting policy work—but when Kamala Harris talked about affordability, she would point to things that would be like, we have a $10,000 credit for home builders making homes for first-time home buyers or something, right? And you just say, this is convoluted, it’s complicated, and it doesn’t apply to that many people.
And I think that this push for universal programs, it really works. I think it appeals to people, but I think it also makes your critics look crazy a lot of the time—the sort of Bill Ackmans of the world, or the Andrew Cuomos, frankly. Like, we’re talking about free buses here, right? And I think that what people are tired of—and what a lot of this sort of Democratic base is tired of—are people saying that things can’t be done, right?
And in Mamdani’s case, it was sort of both things, right? It was that we can make this city a better place, but also that we can fight Donald Trump—that we can resist his administration—that we can, you know, here are the ways that we’re going to do that. And I think when you talk to voters, that is something that they often complain that they’re not hearing from Democratic leaders in particular.
And I think that that’s really where a lot of the energy in this sort of—as we head into the midterm primary season—is right now.
Sargent: Well, and also there’s a lot of stuff out there about how, okay, Mamdani’s campaign can’t teach national Democrats anything because it’s New York City. And there’s sort of something to that, in a way. But at the same time, all this success with immigrant, working-class voters and nonwhite, working-class voters, I think, does carry a lesson for Democrats—especially since Donald Trump made inroads with those communities.
One overlooked thing that happened in the election is that Spanberger and Sherrill both erased the GOP advantage among working-class voters. They both got half of noncollege voters, which was a real improvement over previous performances in the Trump era. But specifically, they did it by running up huge margins with noncollege, nonwhite voters. Again, Trump made big inroads there.
So doesn’t that deserve more attention? You know, not just Mamdani, but Spanberger and Sherrill as well really did amazingly well with working-class nonwhites.
Sheppard: Yeah, and I think, again, a lot of this suggests, too, that the volatility of the current moment—which I think is driven by two factors, right? One are economic concerns, which have just persisted in this, in the current case, mostly because of the actions the administration has taken. But I think one of the things that gets under-discussed is also that the media environment is just completely different than it was 10 years ago as well.
And I think Democrats have started to get better at communicating to voters in ways that they understand and that are legible to them. And I think that was something that Trump grasped—even in 2016—that if you want to reach voters, you have to go to where they are. You have to find them. And that, you know, doing things that seem weird or unconventional, or even are sometimes embarrassing, actually can pay dividends because you’re getting your message out there, and you’re showing that you understand some sort of culture that they’re part of.
And I think that Sherrill in particular is lacking as a messenger. I thought Spanberger ran a very, very interesting and energetic campaign in this way. Mamdani is, I think, the gold standard right now. If you don’t have control over the information environment, then it doesn’t matter what your policies are.
And I think where we’re seeing a shift here is that candidates are finally waking up to that. I think especially with nonwhite voters, especially with working-class voters and immigrants, you have to go. You have to find, sort of, you know, Twitch streams and Instagram influencers. And if you do that it makes a huge difference.
Sargent: I think your point about Mamdani sort of doing something similar to Donald Trump—in the strictly narrow sense that they both know how to be legible—is really critical. There’s another through line here between the Abigail Spanberger, Mikie Sherrill, and Zohran Mamdani victories too. They made costs absolutely central, but they all attacked Trump as well—not just Zohran.
Zohran went more directly at Trump’s authoritarianism and lawlessness, whereas Spanberger and Sherrill attacked him on the economy and somewhat less on the abuses of power. But all the same, they showed—which I think you got at earlier—that anti-Trump politics and pro-affordability politics are the same thing. They’re not, like, things you have to choose between—they’re inextricably connected.
And, Alex, that seems like the route to a new Democratic coalition in the Trump 2.0 era—one that’s kind of united around both anti-Trump and affordability politics. What do you think the possibilities are here?
Sheppard: I mean, I think that they’re pretty vast, I think—partly because what you’ve seen in these very disparate elections—and I think the electorates are fairly different here, too—is that voters grasp all these things, and they respond to them really quickly. And I think that this also expands into other areas, right? I don’t think that, you know, affordability and anti-Trump is, like, the long-term future of the Democratic Party. But if you are building a party that is rooted around a message that is about improving the dignity of life for everyone, right, then that’s a really good way to reach a lot of different types of communities.
And I think it also stands in really sharp contrast to the, frankly, you know, cowardly and dispiriting message that you’re hearing from a lot of Democrats shortly after the election—that, you know, the less the party does, the better—that they need to kind of strategically abandon certain groups to prove their moderation to, you know, what Chuck Schumer called “the Baileys.”
And, you know, what we’re seeing in practice is that voters—both Democratic base voters and swing voters, low-propensity voters, whatever you want to call them—are highly responsive to a party that goes out there and says, you know, we see that you are struggling right now, and we understand something about you, right? And we want to make that better. And here’s how we do it.
You know, one of the reasons why that matters is that there’s no counter-message on the Republican side right now, right? There’s nothing. You have a president who’s literally playing with models in the Oval Office for most of the day, and the government is being run by fascist creeps, right? And people see that kind of stuff.
And I think that there’s this huge vacuum now for policy—but not in the kind of triangulated, hyper-disciplined kind of way. I think if Democrats can go out there and just say, you know, here are five ways that we can improve your day-to-day life—which is what you saw in New Jersey, New York, and Virginia—then they’re going to win elections.
Sargent: Well, just to bring this back to Trump—he’s snapping angrily at Republicans and saying it was all because I wasn’t on the ballot. There seems to be a fundamental inability for him to realize that all of this is his fault, right? Because we started this out by talking about how the country’s really kind of fucked right now. And that’s why voters are turning against Trump and the Republican Party. But he fucked the country. He’s the one who did it.
And no one’s allowed to say this to him. Like, in these meetings with the Republicans—and I can’t be sure this didn’t happen, but it would have been reported if so—no Republican said to him, Mr. President, you know, maybe all the abuses of power and the haphazard destruction of the economy with misguided tariffs are the problem. They can’t say that to him. And so that’s really where we are.
He’s only going to get worse on all these fronts and not better. And so, you know, I wouldn’t guarantee a Dem win in the midterms, but these dynamics don’t seem like they’re going to get better for Trump and the Republican Party, do they?
Sheppard: No, I mean, I think one of the things, you know, just to sort of build off of that, is that Trump is like a creature out of German folklore or something here. And I think that there’s a sense with Republicans—he gives them an ability to win elections that they might not have otherwise. But once he’s in office, he makes everything impossible.
And I think that the Trump that is in the White House right now is vastly diminished from the one in 2017. And I’m not even talking about cognitively—although that’s probably true as well—but Trump, the first-term, first-gen Trump, was still a remarkably adaptive and responsive politician, at least with the Republican base. He was good at reading where the base was. The rallies—he used the rallies as a kind of testing ground for all kinds of stuff.
And that’s all gone now. He is not doing any of that stuff. He’s being surrounded by people who are telling him that he’s doing a great job, that he’s a genius, and that everyone else is stupid and the country’s falling apart. And Democrats are going to be able to make a much simpler electoral case than I think a lot of us thought they would have to as a result.
Sargent: Alex Shepard, all very well said and I think all one hundred percent true. Thanks so much for coming on, man. Always good to talk to you.
Sheppard: Great to talk to you too.