The following is a lightly edited transcript of the July 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.
With the midterms fast approaching, three things are happening all at once. Donald Trump is escalating his war in Iran, the ICE killings have started up, and Trump just unleashed a huge wave of new global tariffs. All this comes amid another unappreciated dynamic. Due to Trump, the GOP has squandered its traditional advantages on three fronts: national security, immigration, and the economy. And everything Trump is doing right now seems likely to only exacerbate that.
To see how all this is playing on the ground, we’re talking to Democratic strategist Andrew Bates, who is working on a number of midterm races. Andrew, good to have you on.
Andrew Bates: Thank you for having me, Greg.
Sargent: Let’s start with the tariffs. This week, Trump unleashed a huge new wave of them—around 10 percent on goods from more than 80 countries, some higher than 10 percent. This includes 50 percent tariffs on Canadian exports.
Andrew, the initial wave of tariffs are what caused Trump’s approval on the economy to start unraveling in the first place. They’re a big reason he’s at extraordinary lows on the economy right now. What are you hearing back from Democratic candidates? Are you hearing that they’re planning to campaign hard against the new round?
Bates: Yes, they are. There’s a big change between 2024 and 2026 in the way that both parties are going to talk about tariffs. And it’s because in 2024, tariffs coded to a lot of people as, this is a way you shake up the economy. There was a lot of fatigue with high prices. Trump was promising that immediately, quote-unquote, he would lower costs, and tariffs were a critical way he said he would do this. Then people lived through them. And now, like you were talking about, because prices went up across the board, they’re extremely unpopular, and more tariffs are the opposite of what voters want, including a lot of Republican voters.
So it’s something that Democrats, wherever they fall within the ideological spectrum of the party, have been unified in calling out as something that is going to hurt everyday people. It’s also powerful that the tariff revenue goes to fund the tax breaks for billionaires and monopolies, which are also very unpopular.
Sargent: Yeah, and in fact that’s what tariffs are. They’re a tax. And Trump has openly and explicitly used them to offset shortfalls created by cutting taxes on the super rich. Now, I want to talk about your point about tariffs kind of coding as shaking up the economy.
Trump was sort of seen as this figure who gets stuff done, who can kind of stride out onto the global stage and grab it by the collar and shake it all up. And I think those tariffs, when he was talking about them, may have also coded as, in some sense, pro-worker. He’s protecting American workers with the government, with decisive action. And one of the big civic success stories, I think, that we’ve seen is that the American people learned what tariffs actually are.
Bates: It’s working people who are hurt the most. Manufacturing jobs are down as a consequence of the tariffs. And in 2024, Republicans were saying, this is how we bring manufacturing back. But now people have lived through the opposite. It’s also been very painful for people in rural areas.
If you are a farmer, the chances are that not only do you have to pay more for your needs to produce crops—because the materials that are used to make farming equipment, like aluminum and steel, cost more, right, or the Iran war has caused gas prices and diesel prices to go up, and you need that as well—but at the same time, you’re in this sandwich where your export customers are often choosing not to buy American products because of retaliation for the tariffs. And that’s a huge hit to farming communities, because over a fifth of American crops are usually exported.
Sargent: Republicans, in fact, are clearly worried about the new wave of tariffs. One ally of the White House told Politico that “if it’s not focused on affordability, it’s not helpful.” And he said the tariffs will be reflexively seen as a “bad thing” by voters, meaning there’s no way to really message about them.
Another Republican told Politico this: “Any conversation about tariffs, unless it’s reducing them, is a bad conversation for Republicans.”
Bates: Overwhelmingly, the swing voters who chose Republicans in 2024 did so because they were promised inflation would go down, and because they were promised this chaos and violence in the world would also be reduced. It’s not that these people were signing a contract that they were going to worship the MyPillow guy or anything like that. It’s that they had practical needs.
And when you see a president do things like prioritize a ballroom one day and then the next day actively raise your prices anymore—you want to see your member of Congress stand up against it. And too many of these Republicans are in a cowed place where they aren’t doing it. But a lot of them are really going to wish that they had.
Sargent: Well, Andrew, you’re working for Rebecca Cooke, who’s running against Representative Derrick Van Orden in one of the most contested House races in Wisconsin. It’s an interesting district. It’s pretty rural. It’s Republican-leaning. What are you seeing on the ground there with regard to the tariffs? Is that a place where she can really engage on this issue, and how?
Bates: She’s been very critical of the tariffs, and she has unique credibility to talk about it because she grew up on a dairy farm, and her family needed to sell their cows because of competing with Big Ag. And so she knows what it is like to struggle and to come from an agricultural background.
And like we were talking about a moment ago, the tariffs have been especially hurtful to farmers, because while all their input costs are rising—they have to pay more for diesel, for equipment, for fertilizer, as a combination of what’s happened with tariffs and the Iran war, other kinds of chaos—at the same time, they’re losing export customers.
And she has been very hardworking about going to every single corner of the district to hear from people and to talk with them about what needs to change. And she has also been very emphatic about how the big beautiful bill at the same time has done so much to hurt working people in the district, like closing down hospitals.
Sargent: Well, Andrew, it’s still tough to win these rural voters. The problem is that even if they agree with us and agree with Democrats about the tariffs, about the economy and so forth, they’re just culturally very, very pro-Republican. This is a tough district.
Can you talk candidly about whether it’s really possible to convert those voters and take what you know is essentially a real set of sentiments, a real set of dissatisfactions, and convert them into a willingness to vote for Democrats? Why is that so hard?
Bates: It’s hard because we have made a lot of mistakes during this time period as a party. And I think that it has to begin with what we were just talking about, which is respect. We are up against several big disadvantages. One of which is, right now Republicans have a much bigger megaphone than Democrats do.
There are media outlets like Fox News that have much bigger audiences than mainstream media or Democratic-leaning media. Republicans have also been smarter about investing in reaching people online, which also goes to the point about respect—because an important measure of respect is, are you doing the work to come into people’s living rooms, to meet them where they are? And we failed in that area when it comes to going onto podcasts and streaming shows and a lot of these platforms where people really get more of their information now.
But it also has to do with having the guts to show when a stereotype that’s being applied to you is not right. For example, there is a notion that gets pushed on the right that Democrats look down on people of faith. And in my experience, as a person of faith from North Carolina who’s proud of both of those things, that’s not how most of the Democrats I have known in my life actually feel.
Most of the Democrats I’ve known are fellow religious people. But there are some voices within our larger coalition who do further those kinds of stereotypes. And that puts even more of an onus on those of us who really care about reaching out and growing our level of support, to show that that’s not who we are.
And a big part of it also has to do with—along similar lines—there is a widespread belief that Democrats feel like if we have a single disagreement with you, we think you are a bad person and that you are not very smart, and that we don’t want your vote, when we need to be as inclusive as possible.
Sargent: Andrew, tell us what specifically Rebecca Cooke is doing to reach some of these very hard-to-convert voters—rural Americans, people who voted for Trump, right-leaning independents, those types of people. What specifically is she doing?
Bates: She’s showing up everywhere, including the smallest towns in the most rural corners of that district. She’s proving to people that she’s listening to them, because that’s crucial. Whoever listens the most to voters and treats them with respect, I think, is often the candidate who wins. She is talking about how her personal lived experience means that she can relate to people who are hurting now. She’s someone who works multiple waitress jobs right now to make ends meet. Like we were talking about, she grew up on a dairy farm that had trouble competing with bigger agricultural interests.
And she also has had the courage to say when she disagrees with certain points of view that do exist within the Democratic Party. Like, she has been very clear that she thinks the idea of defunding the police is a really bad one, and that she would never vote for anything along those lines. And that is something that goes a very long way with folks who, like most of the country, are not political junkies, but have heard that about Democrats, and it makes them skeptical.
Sargent: Yeah, I can see that that would be kind of a signifier of sorts. And that kind of brings me to immigration. We’re seeing these two other major developments in addition to this huge wave of tariffs and all this economic discontent.
We’re now having more situations where these paramilitary forces unleashed by Trump are killing people on the streets of U.S. cities. We are also seeing the war escalate. Trump is yet again today, as we speak, talking about how he’s going to just destroy Iran and bomb this and bomb that, and kind of scoffing at the idea that there’s anything wrong with bombing civilian targets.
And so let me ask you this. I understand that defund the police is a good thing for someone like Rebecca Cooke to condemn, but can she also essentially speak to real voter angst out there about ICE? There’s got to be a way she can do that. Is she doing that? And is she condemning the war, beyond just saying closing the Strait of Hormuz is hurting your pocketbook? Can she make a moral case on these other issues as well, or not?
Bates: Yes, she’s doing that on both. And that has been the case with every Democrat that I’m working with, or that people close to me are working with. It’s something that is often brought up proactively. Ending the war has been a major priority for her and for everybody else that I’m dealing with, for a lot of reasons.
One is, most of them agreed with Trump in 2024 when he said we should not go into new wars. I agreed with that too. Now he’s pretending he never said it. And this week, Derrick Van Orden and most Republicans in Congress voted to keep funding this war. It is costing lives, which is tragic, and it is raising costs even more, on top of the tariffs and the tax cuts for the rich and everything else.
And on the subject of ICE—something that connects almost everything that people dislike about the Republicans who are in charge in Washington now is abuse of power. That’s true with this illegal war. It is true when you think about the horrifying behavior of ICE agents, racially profiling people, harassing folks in their community. There have been innocent people killed. It’s also abuse of power when you see Donald Trump and his family making billions of dollars off of taxpayers in ways that make what they screamed at Hunter Biden for look quaint.
But yes, I think that especially after the killings in Minnesota, and the videos that have been pervasive on social media where everyday Americans, including strong Trump supporters, see law enforcement officers wearing masks and killing people despite them being in complete accord with the law—like Alex Pretti, he had every legal right to have a pistol on his person.
Everyone has seen multiple videos that show he was not reaching for it. Roy Cooper in North Carolina, I thought, did a good job of calling out that his First Amendment and Second Amendment rights were violated. And I think that a lot of other Democrats have done the same.
Sargent: That’s very shrewd. I want to pick up on that. He really made the case about ICE in a way that could appeal to a whole lot of voters that are not normally willing to listen to Democrats. That’s pretty impressive stuff. I think there’s a heavy 2006 feeling in the air as well. 2006, of course, was when, under George W. Bush, Democrats won back both chambers of Congress, the House and the Senate, in a pretty extraordinary victory. One of the things that ran through that election, that set of elections, was abuse of power. And similar to now, George Bush was abusing his power on multiple fronts. Now Donald Trump is.
Are your candidates out there making a big argument to voters about how he’s abusing his power on all these fronts? These are areas that Democrats have historically been a little reluctant to be aggressive in—national security, immigration. But there’s a through line here. He’s completely out of control. He’s a madman, basically. Are Democrats that are running in tough areas able to make a big argument about those things?
Bates: Yes. And I think what really punctured the reasons for why Democrats were cautious about this in the past is the same thing as with the tariffs. It’s that people have lived through things that they strongly disapprove of. And in 2024, and earlier, warnings about this kind of behavior that you were seeing from ICE, or the kind of out-of-control national security situations—it didn’t sound realistic to people. But now that they are seeing it with their own eyes, they could not be more opposed. That changes so much.
Sargent: Well, let’s go to the big picture, which is that Republicans generally have this advantage in three areas: national security, immigration, and the economy. He’s now deeply underwater on every one of those things, and the polls are telling us very clearly that this is hurting Republicans.
The new Fox poll has Democrats leading Republicans on the economy by 54 to 45 percent, nine points on the economy. Democrats are one point up on Republicans on immigration in the Fox poll. Then there’s this new poll from Strength in Numbers and Verasight, which has Dems up on the economy over Republicans by 44 to 39. And this poll has Dems nearly at parity on immigration, and up five points on foreign policy, 43 to 38. Finally, the Washington Post poll has approval of Trump on Iran at 29 percent.
I’ve not seen anything quite like this before. We’re looking at sort of a level of, I guess, transformation in what’s going on with the electorate and what’s going on with the parties that’s really kind of unusual. Can you talk about that big picture?
Bates: Yes. And I think this connects several of the themes we’ve talked about. One is disrespect of the voters by egotistical people in charge. The other is the need to listen to voters about what it is that actually causes them pain in their daily lives. And prices were already high in 2024 when Republicans ran on lowering them.
There was already so much chaos and violence in the world when Republicans ran in 2024 on stabilizing the world. And now people have had to live through seeing this crowd abuse their power in ways that make all the problems they voted to end worse. And you can’t get away from it. You’re reminded every single time you go to the grocery store, or every time you need to put gas in your car.
And you’re offended when you see folks in Washington making billions of dollars personally off of you, talking about how one of their highest priorities is building a ballroom, and that they don’t think about everyday people’s finances—that’s a direct quote. And especially when your representative, who’s supposed to fight for your community’s interests and for your interests, is instead selling out to those people and becoming a more corrupt establishment than anything that has existed before in our lifetimes—that’s the sort of thing that can bring about a sea change in public opinion. And it’s why you are seeing the most anti-incumbent mood since at least 2006.
Sargent: Andrew Bates, thank you for all your candor. We really appreciate you coming on. Thanks so much.
Bates: Thank you for having me.