The following is a lightly edited transcript of the April 23 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 pays close attention to Fox News polling, so surely he’ll see the latest one from Fox, and it’s a real doozy. His numbers on the economy are indescribably awful. And the poll also shows that Democrats have the advantage over Republicans on the economy for the first time in many years—a real milestone. All this comes as several new reports suggest Trump knows he’s in real trouble. He’s eyeing more purges of top staff. And his top lieutenants are feverishly searching for a midterm strategy.
G. Elliott Morris, who runs the Strength in Numbers Substack, has been arguing for some time that Trump’s numbers are much worse than our mainstream discourse allows. So we’re talking to him about all this today. Elliott, always good to have you on.
G. Elliott Morris: Hey, thanks for having me back, Greg.
Sargent: So let’s start with this new Fox News poll. It has Trump’s approval on the economy at 34 percent of voters nationally, with 66 percent disapproving—I’ll do the math, that’s two thirds disapproving. His approval on inflation is even worse. It’s at 28 percent with 72 percent disapproving, which is almost three quarters. Elliott, can you put that in context for us? How bad are those numbers?
Morris: So Greg, great question. The first thing I did was look up Joe Biden’s approval rating on the same question. Joe Biden bottomed out at a minus 32 net approval rating—that’s the difference between his approval and disapproval in this survey. That was in May of 2023. That’s like when inflation was at 8 to 10 percent and people were really stressed out about prices.
Donald Trump hit minus 32 in this polling today. That’s the net rating for his approval on the economy. So if you’re getting lost in the numbers, I think that’s some really useful context. Donald Trump’s numbers on the economy—the thing that he won the 2024 election on—are as bad as Joe Biden’s were during the peak inflation crisis of 2022 and 2023.
Sargent: Amazing. And let’s talk about those inflation numbers. I don’t think I’ve seen anything quite like this. Twenty-eight percent approving, 72 percent disapproving—again, nearly three quarters of the country disapproving of Trump on inflation, the issue that is easily one of the top two or three for people.
Morris: Yeah, and this is kind of the same thing, right? Donald Trump won the 2024 election on getting prices down and getting the economy moving after COVID. Okay, arguably it was already doing that, but let’s just grant him that that’s why he won. He’s at minus 44 on this in the Fox News survey on net. In my polling, he’s at minus 46.
So it’s not like this is an outlier number. Basically, three fourths of the public doesn’t like how the president is handling inflation. That is consequential—that’s the thing he won on. If he’s that low on the number one issue, then like, what is this White House even doing if that’s where they’re ending up on this question?
Sargent: Well, we’re going to talk about that in a second, but there’s a real kill shot in the Fox poll. It finds that Democrats are favored over Republicans on the economy for the first time since 2010. Fifty-two percent pick Democrats and 48 percent pick Republicans. And on prices, again, it’s even worse—54 percent favor Democrats versus 46 percent who favor Republicans.
Elliott, we’ve been told for a very long time that Democrats are in deep trouble because voters prefer Republicans on a range of matters. This seems to upend that. No? What are your thoughts on all that?
Morris: Greg, I looked up the Republican and Democratic Party’s numbers on the economy for 2024. These numbers come from Gallup. Gallup found that on the question of which party was “better able to keep America prosperous”—I know, slightly different than who do you trust on the economy, but that’s the question wording they use—the Republican Party had a six-percentage-point advantage going into the 2024 election.
So this Fox News poll shows what a 15, 16 percentage point swing. In my survey out this month in April, Democrats beat the Republicans on handling jobs and the economy by 10 points as well.
Sargent: I do want to talk about your Verasight poll because it showed something similar in a bigger sense too. You found that the Republican Party is now more disliked than the Democratic Party is. The Democrats are at 45 percent approval to 48 percent disapproval—not great, but pretty close to parity maybe. But the Republican Party is at 39 percent approval to 55 percent disapproval. And I thought, fascinating number from your poll—Democrats are 11 points ahead of Republicans on who looks out for the middle class.
It’s now kind of hard to dismiss what we’re seeing here because the pattern is starting to really emerge. Democrats are taking the lead or gaining the advantage on the economy now. It’s not just disapproval of Trump and people also hate Democrats. It’s voters now starting to look to Democrats as the better party on this issue. Is that basically what’s happening?
Morris: Yeah, that’s what I see. There was a lot of hand-wringing about the 2024 election after the fact and why Kamala Harris lost to Donald Trump. And a lot of the—let’s just call it the strategist class, I guess, Greg—was talking a lot about how the Democrats were too left-leaning on this social issue or that economic proposal or what have you. But actually what the political science says, and what our polling said at the time, was that voters were just really upset at the ruling party about prices, about the daily cost of normal economic life in America.
And if that was the case, then your inference should have been all along that as the economy failed to recover to the level that Americans are expecting it to, as prices stayed elevated and wages didn’t catch up, that voters would turn that anger against the Republican Party—the party that came in charge. And I think that this polling is showing that that trend is really coming true now.
Sargent: Yeah, and this is not unimportant. I really want to underscore that. The entire pundit class and the entire strategist class—with some exceptions, but basically that whole group of people—over-read the significance of Trump’s 2024 win. And I don’t think there’s been any real accountability or admission of that fact.
It’s very clear right now that that’s what happened. Now I don’t want to get too confident or anything about Democratic chances—anything could happen in these midterms. Maybe Trump comes back, maybe I don’t know. And maybe the numbers for Democrats are bad enough that it’ll mute their win in the midterms. But still, I would like to just have it a little more broadly understood that Trump’s 2024 win was, as you say, not the seismic shift in the electorate that we were told it was and that there was a massive overinterpretation. Your thoughts on that?
Morris: Yeah, but Greg, he only won by a point and a half. I mean, the guy won by three times less of a margin than Joe Biden did. He barely won the swing states as well—he won Pennsylvania by what, a point and a half? We were writing this at the time. This was not like the big electoral victory for MAGA Trumpism that he wanted the media to believe.
Sargent: There are some signs that Team Trump knows they’re in trouble. CNN reports that a bunch of Trump advisors are plotting this new push centered on messaging the midterms as a choice between the two parties and not as a direct referendum on Trump’s presidency. I’m going to quote from the CNN report: “The strategy is driven by internal polling showing the Republicans still hold a trust advantage over the Democratic Party on some key issues, even as Americans have soured on Trump and his performance overall.”
Well, I don’t even think that these advisors can count on that. They can’t count on Republicans necessarily holding a trust advantage over the Democrats at this point, can they?
Morris: It really just depends on what survey question you’re picking. Yeah, sure, Republicans have a trust advantage over immigration. But if you ask Americans who they’re going to vote for, they still say they’re going to vote for the Democratic Party in those same survey numbers.
So unless the Trump White House and the RNC have some plan for materially changing opinion about what issues people say are most important to them, over-indexing on stuff where Republicans have a trust advantage on immigration and border security just is not a solution to their current problems. Their problem right now is that the American people don’t trust the Republican Party to handle their most important issues—period, full stop. Over-indexing on things that aren’t the most important issue is not going to change that.
Sargent: So let’s talk about the battle for the House. What is your latest polling finding on that and what’s your general sense of it?
Morris: The House, I think, is probably a foregone conclusion for the Democrats, if I’m being honest with you, Greg. I mean, the generic ballot in our survey is D+7. There’s a pretty predictable historical pattern where the party out of power gains ground as the midterms go along—so the party out of power is the Democrats, and we should expect them to gain at least a couple of points in the generic ballot over the next couple of months.
And the Democrats are emerging from this referendum in Virginia with maybe a net add in their number of seats from the redistricting wars that Donald Trump started. Nex year, if you redo the House elections from 2024 just with the new lines, it looks like Democrats will actually have gained one seat from that, which means Republicans would have had only a two-seat advantage, I think, at 219.
Like, the average swing in a midterm normally, without a president at 20 percent on prices, is for that party to lose 26 seats in the House. With a president at a 35, 36 percent approval rating, that loss of seats goes up to closer to 35, 36. This is a level of political gravity that the Republican Party is not, in any conceivable electoral simulation, going to be able to dig itself out of. I would put this at like 95, 96 percent chance. I’m almost sure Democrats will take the House.
Sargent: And what do the averages have on the generic ballot right now?
Morris: Our average at 50 Plus One has Democrats up five and a half points right now.
Sargent: So we probably need to see that swell a little, right? And you expect that to happen due to historical patterns?
Morris: Yeah, I expect that number to increase. But even if it was just +5, we’re still talking about Democrats flipping, you know, 10, 15 seats, which is more than they need. They just need two or three.
Sargent: Right. Exactly. Well, so there are other signs that Trump knows that he’s in big trouble here. Politico reports that it’s plausible that more purges of top officials are coming. A Republican senator anonymously says to Politico, “He’s in a bad mood. So he’s letting a lot of them go,” speaking of people around Trump. The senator continued, “He’s preparing to really let a lot of them go.”
Trump looks like he’s in a pretty foul mood these days. And I’ve got to think a lot of these numbers that they’re looking at privately as well as publicly explain that. We are seeing people start to drop out of the administration as well. I expect that to continue. Is that the sort of thing that can help, though? It sort of seems like that’s not really going to do much.
Morris: It’s just not what the American people are concerned about. And I’ll just say one thing. There’s also this idea in the Republican Party right now that maybe Donald Trump will do some sort of presidential campaign-style tour of America to juice turnout among those lower-turnout, lower-likelihood Republican voters, those types of voters who turned up in 2024 for him. That actually is a good idea. Trying to get turnout up among those low-propensity voters is what they need to do—they need those voters to show up.
We’ve been seeing all these special elections when you just have the high-likelihood turnout voters show up, but those are Democrats winning by 15 points on average better than Kamala Harris did. So that’s not going to fly.
But the thing is, Greg, Donald Trump is having what, like three press conferences a day in the White House where he’s just sleeping through them? He does not have the juice to do a campaign across America, presidential election-style campaign. It’ll probably kill the guy.
So not to be too morbid—I just don’t think that that’s a workable strategy. And the fact that they’re throwing out all these different ideas about how they might win, different things they could try, just throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks—that shows that they really acknowledge the depth of the problem that they have.
Sargent: Yeah, he really does seem to lack the juice to pull something like that off. And in fact, we have some numbers that really get at that as well. In the Fox poll, 55 percent say Trump doesn’t have the mental soundness to be president—that’s a solid majority versus only 45 percent who say he does.
And in your poll, 55 percent support impeaching Trump, kind of coincidentally. So this is really a very clear situation where a solid majority of the country just doesn’t think this guy should be in the White House, shouldn’t be in the Oval Office, is not fit for the job, is just fucking it up and needs to go. Isn’t that sort of the basic size of it at bottom?
Morris: Yeah, I think the basic shape of this problem is that the president has spent a year and a half now campaigning on four or five major policies that the American people don’t like, right? Just to name them—mass deportations for people who have been here 20 years, for regular working families, people don’t like that. The tariffs, people don’t like that. Rollback in ACA subsidies, people don’t like that. Tax cuts for the rich, people don’t like that. And a war in Iran, people don’t like that.
And this has been day after day coverage that the Trump administration is giving freely. They do press conferences about this, drawing attention to these unpopular policies. If you do that over and over again for 14 or 16 months, whatever it’s been, and you’re like the public face of all these negative policies, there’s going to be backlash against that. That’s really what we should expect.
Sargent: Great. So just to close this out, we’ve had a number of polls that show Trump’s overall approval—not just on the economy, overall approval—in the thirties. The New York Times polling averages, which are not really polluted by bad data, have him at 39, which is not where he’s been in averages for most of the last year and a half.
Is that low enough to make the Senate gettable for Democrats? What’s your reading on that? Where does Trump have to be approval-wise to get to four seats, which Democrats need to net? These are very tough races—they’re running in some very hard states. What’s your sense of it? Where does Trump have to be for Democrats to win the Senate?
Morris: Greg, the median Senate seat leans toward Republicans by about seven or eight percentage points. So the Democrats would need to lead to win the House by about seven or eight percent to have an equal shot at winning control of the Senate—50 seats in a good year with good candidates, good engagement, whatever, a year like a midterm year. Democrats right now have to win 51 seats.
So add a couple points onto that—that means maybe D+10, D+9, they are favored to win the Senate. Today in our survey, they’re at D+7. On average, they’re at D+5. So imagine that Democrats gain a couple of points before the midterms—then they’re on the precipice of taking back the Senate on average. Donald Trump is at 37 percent approval in our average today. So if he gets down to 35, 34, you’re at the point where Democrats are taking back the Senate. And that is very plausible.
Sargent: Folks, make sure to check out G. Elliott Morris’s great Substack, Strength in Numbers—and he does his own polling, which we talked about today. Elliott, always great to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming on.
Morris: Thanks very much, Greg.