The following is a lightly edited transcript of the March 27 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 is very worried about the midterm elections. In a series of Truth Social posts, he raged wildly at Republicans for failing to pass voter suppression legislation, which is explicitly designed to prevent Republicans from losing control of Congress. Trump is right to panic. A crushing new Fox News poll finds his disapproval at record highs and his Iran War badly tanking. And yet Trump keeps talking about the war in ways that reveal zero awareness of the political problem it’s become. If the war does work against Republicans this fall, it would be a striking and heartening development. So we’re talking about this possibility with Ryan O’Donnell, the executive director for the progressive group Data for Progress, which has its own polling on the war. Ryan, good to have you on.
Ryan O’Donnell: Thanks so much for having me.
Sargent: So in these Truth Social posts, Trump erupted at Republicans for failing to pass the SAVE Act. This would be incredibly onerous voter suppression legislation requiring voter ID and proof of citizenship in ways that would surely disenfranchise enormous numbers of people. But Ryan, the thing is that’s deliberate. They’re not even hiding the fact that the bill is designed to keep Republicans in control of the House—which they’re now in great danger of losing—and the Senate too. The panic is very palpable, isn’t it?
O’Donnell: Yeah, I mean, they clearly see the writing on the wall. They know how dangerous the midterms are looking for them. And, you know, they’ve seen what happened in 2018. And just like everything that Donald Trump has been doing recently has just been incredibly unpopular with voters. And so he’s trying to do whatever he can to save himself.
Sargent: Yeah, it’s really important to look at it as like a three-part process. There’s the direct voter suppression legislation, there’s the effort to completely rig the House maps across the country in an extraordinarily corrupt way, and there’s the talk about using ICE agents at polls to intimidate and suppress voters.
O’Donnell: As much as Donald Trump and the administration like to talk about how they don’t read polls and that they don’t trust them, they know exactly what’s happening. They know that this stuff that they’re doing is all incredibly unpopular. Every day they’re doing something new that’s driving them deeper and deeper into the ground. As you said, as we saw in this Fox poll, his disapproval rating is at the highest ever.
Sargent: Okay, so let’s get into some specifics. Trump wants Republicans to end the filibuster because the SAVE Act can’t pass the Senate. In one tweet, he said this: “When is enough enough for our Republican senators? TERMINATE THE FILIBUSTER.” And he called for passing an end to vote by mail as part of this package, among other things. In a second tweet, he said again in all caps, “TERMINATE THE FILIBUSTER.”
So it’s not even clear Republicans can do this even if they want to—they don’t seem to have enough Republican support to end the filibuster. But Ryan, I’ve got to say, the pressure seems like it’s going to keep mounting from Trump and MAGA. How do you see this playing out? I don’t feel that confident that they won’t try it.
O’Donnell: It’s certainly something that Trump wants to do, and I think Republicans are very hesitant on it right now. But if they see it as their only path forward, I don’t think that Donald Trump is going to stop pushing for it anytime soon.
Sargent: Yeah, I think they could definitely try it—whether it works or not is hard to say, and how it actually plays in the midterms. If it were to pass, I mean, it would be an absolute abomination. It would be absolutely disgusting morally, and terrible for the country and terrible for democracy. But it is at least marginally possible that it would hurt Republicans more than Democrats, since Democrats are highly engaged voters in midterms.
O’Donnell: Yeah, that’s right. I mean, we’ve been seeing this shift ever since education polarization has taken over—basically that whether or not somebody has a college degree now says a lot about who you’re voting for. And since that’s changed, Democrats have largely become the party of midterms, which is a fairly new thing in recent American history. And so it could actually end up hurting Republicans more, but the moral issue is obviously way more important here.
Sargent: No, absolutely. So in a third tweet, Trump exploded again, calling Chuck Schumer a “desperate crippled politician” who has lost control of the radical left Democrats. And again, he demanded an end to the filibuster—which is funny, because Republicans are the real problem for Trump and he knows it.
O’Donnell: He’s getting more unpopular, and I do think that there’s also a possibility that more Republicans are going to start to break with him as they get to the midterms, because they know that he’s toxic.
Sargent: That’s really interesting. It would be quite the poetic justice moment if his own unpopularity was what got Republicans to refuse to follow him down this voter suppression path.
Let’s talk about this extraordinary new Fox poll. It finds that only 42 percent of voters support Trump’s war against Iran and 58 percent oppose it. Trump’s overall disapproval rating is 59 percent—that’s the highest ever in Fox polling for Trump in either term. His approval is only 41 percent. And this is a Fox poll. Ryan, it’s very clear that the war is politically working squarely against Trump and Republicans now. Your thoughts on those numbers?
O’Donnell: They’re terrible. We find similar things—people not only disapprove of the war, but they also, even in that same Fox News poll, said that it would make the U.S. less safe going into this war. So voters aren’t just ambivalent about this, right? They’re actively opposed to it. We actually also asked a question recently about launching a war with Iran and whether it benefits Israel or the United States more. And actually more people—including Republicans—said that it benefits Israel more. And so it’s something that people just don’t want to see.
I mean, people have been telling us since right after the pandemic that affordability is their number one concern. And Trump has just been doing anything he can not just to keep his eye off focusing on affordability for voters, but also actively making it worse. Like, we asked people recently too if they’ve been paying more or less for gas, and almost 80 percent of voters just this past week said that they’ve been paying more for gas.
Sargent: Wow, that is really extraordinary. I think you raise an important point there that it’s not ambivalence—it’s active opposition. All this polling really strongly suggests that voters are squarely rejecting the central arguments that Trump is making for this thing. One thing on the Fox poll, by the way: his approval among independents is 25 percent, his disapproval among independents is 75 percent, and only 28 percent of independents support the war in Iran.
On top of that, Ryan, Trump is underwater with non-college whites and even non-college white men. Those demographics also oppose the war. That sure looks like he’s losing his base in part over the war, doesn’t it?
O’Donnell: I think it’s very clear that he’s losing the exact voters that helped win him the presidency in 2024. We recently published something about disaffected Trump voters and the people who are leaving his coalition.
And what we found, after doing some modeling on our own data, is that people of color, younger voters, women, and also people that don’t pay that much attention to political news are all leaving him and are all much more likely now to say that they disapprove of him. That’s voters of color, young people—obviously he didn’t win those voters, but he was able to make significant inroads in 2024. With that falling away, that coalition is evaporating.
Sargent: So not only is Trump underwater with non-college whites and even non-college white men who are his base, he’s also losing these working-class voters who he won over in 2024, right? We’re talking about young voters, non-white working class, non-white non-college, that type of demographic. The whole coalition seems to be eroding on every single level in every single way you look at it.
O’Donnell: Yeah, I mean, well—tell me something that Donald Trump has done recently that people support. Whether it’s Epstein or ICE or the shutdown or Iran, he’s just bleeding, when people just want him to focus on affordability and costs here at home. And nobody thinks that that’s what he’s focused on right now. So people that used to support him are leaving him.
And with regards to how this war is impacting the midterms—we did a poll recently with Zeteo and Dropsite where we asked people if they would be more or less likely to vote for a candidate in 2026 who supports the war in Iran, and 51 percent of voters were less likely to vote for someone—and that’s with only 32 percent more likely. So it’s a net [negative] 19.
We also asked about a candidate for president in 2028 who supports the war with Iran—that was negative 22. And we asked about the reelection of a U.S. Congress member in 2026 who supports Trump’s supplemental funding request to continue the war in Iran—and that was negative 20. So everything about this war is not only unpopular now, but it’s making Republicans’ chances in November less and less likely.
Sargent: That is extraordinary stuff right there. Now, as you said earlier, obviously the big issue for everybody is prices and the economy—that’s what’s weighing most heavily on the voters who will probably decide the midterms. But I’ve got to say, the war seems like it’s a pretty fat target for Democrats. And yet I don’t see Democrats going after it as strongly as I’d like to.
I mean, they’re certainly way better than they were during past conflicts—they’ve been opposed to the war pretty much at the outset, which is itself a striking development in Democratic politics. Usually the party’s much more split in these situations. But do you think Democrats are prosecuting the case against the war frontally enough in these midterms or not?
O’Donnell: I mean, I think they’re starting to make the case. And like you said, they’ve come out against it from the start, which is new for the Democratic Party. And like we saw, people like Barack Obama swept into office by opposing the Iraq War. And it is something that’s salient for voters, especially pending how long this war goes on and how much it costs.
But for me, what I would like to see Democrats do more of in this moment is—you know, Trump is asking for $200 billion in funding, and there should be more discussion about this war, because it’s going on right now, and what we could be doing with that money if we kept it here. More Democrats, in my opinion, should be talking about: if we kept the $200 billion here, how much would that save you in your healthcare costs? How many people could go to college for free? Et cetera.
Sargent: Right, that message polls pretty well as far as I can tell—it’s a strong one for Democrats. We had Representative Adam Smith, who’s the ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, on this show just the other day, and he said “hell no” to funding. He said no Democrat should support another dime of funding for the war. I would like to hear more Democrats saying that, wouldn’t you?
O’Donnell: Me too.
Sargent: Trump had a funny aside at his cabinet meeting that we can close on. He talked about oil and the stock market and the war. Listen to this.
Donald Trump (voiceover): Frankly, I thought the oil prices would go up more and I thought the stock market would go down more. Hasn’t been nearly as severe as I thought. I think they have confidence in—maybe the American president.
Sargent: So Trump thought that oil would go up and the stock market would go down if he invaded Iran. That’s quite an admission—he said it straight out. He thought these things would happen and he did it anyway. But that aside, this kind of shrugging off of the problem is not going to go down well with voters who are upset about the economy and costs, is it?
O’Donnell: Exactly. I mean, you are never winning when you’re trying to convince people why their prices going up might be a good thing—which is what Donald Trump has been trying to do for the last couple of days. It kind of is, you know, reminiscent of when Biden was trying to really convince people that the prices weren’t bad. And I think that, you know, that obviously didn’t work out very well.
Sargent: Well, we’ve got around four or five months to go until the midterm elections actually happen. How confident are you that this current dynamic and these current numbers are going to sustain themselves through the midterms, and what’s the nightmare scenario to worry about?
O’Donnell: It’s a good question. I mean, the closest thing to compare it to is 2018, right? Where we had a Trump presidency and the midterms were a referendum on him. Things are looking fairly similar to 2018 at this point with regards to the numbers—in a lot of ways they crept up for Democrats in the generic congressional ballot as we went along. And so by all accounts now, I do think that Democrats are looking toward a good November. But things are even more tumultuous now than they were back in 2018 in some ways. So who knows what can happen. But traditionally, the party out of power does very well in the midterms, and I think Democrats are on track to do that.
We live in a news cycle that’s incredibly short and people’s memories—they’re forgetting about things much quicker than ever before, I think. So the nightmare scenario for Democrats at this point is that Donald Trump wraps up all these incredibly unpopular things he’s doing, with many, many months to go before the midterms, and actually focuses on lowering costs for Americans and drops all of the things he’s focused on that the American public doesn’t want him to focus on right now.
And also I would say that one of the reasons why Democrats aren’t overperforming on the generic congressional ballot as they should at this point is because the American public doesn’t think that they have a plan to fight for affordability either. And so the nightmare scenario is that—since Trump does have control over Congress and the presidency and can actually do something on some of these issues—if Democrats don’t show that they’re actually the ones to fight for affordability, then you could see things not ending as well as we would think at this point.
Sargent: Yeah, and it doesn’t seem likely, I’ve got to say, that Trump’s going to drop all the unpopular things and suddenly focus on costs—he’s just not particularly interested in costs, as we saw from that video. Just to finish this out, one thing that I’m heartened by—and I’m curious to hear your take on it—is that you really do have a lot of strong Democratic candidates running.
And this is exactly the kind of environment where even if the national Democratic Party’s image is in bad shape, which it absolutely is, voters are going to give a hearing to some of these Democratic candidates. And these are strong candidates—they’re talking a lot about costs and they seem to know how to win elections. It looks like it right now. Is that your feeling as well?
O’Donnell: Yeah, I think there are a lot of really, really strong candidates out there who are talking about things in the right way. I think what we saw in our data over and over again, especially since the beginning of the Trump term, is how badly Democrats and independents who lean Democratic just wanted their representatives to fight against Trump. And that’s what we heard over and over again—it beat out everything. They just thought that the Democratic Party was looking weaker and more and more feckless. And they wanted somebody to stop all the things that were happening.
Like, to your point about Donald Trump just keeps doing all of these incredibly unpopular things—the American public wants them to stop. And Democrats specifically want their representatives to fight hard enough to stop that from happening. And I think there are a lot of great candidates out there that are actually showing the will and power to do that.
Sargent: Yes, it really is very similar to 2018 in that sense—Trump’s first presidency ushered in a whole wave of really, really good Democratic candidates. And I think the same is happening now. Ryan O’Donnell, awesome to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming on.
O’Donnell: Thanks so much for having me.