Chapter 1: What were the implications of the recent Democratic wins in key states?
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Hello and welcome to the Bullard Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. Delighted to welcome back to the show my friend, politics reporter at Semaphore, author of The Show That Never Ends, The Rise and Fall of Prague Rock. We'll get to that at the end. But we got some politicking to do first. It's Dave Weigel.
David, we'll do some New York mayor's race, but Zoran there delivering a message to Grandpa Trump. Make sure he was listening. It feels like he was listening last night. He did some bleeding. What did you think was the message that was taken from the president last night?
Chapter 2: How has Trump's economic performance affected voter sentiment?
It was... Really unsurprising. The president's been kind of boring, frankly, about New York. And you could tell that Zoran was bored in talking about it. He was a very on message candidate, kind of famously. It was a very funny interview he did with Ari Melber where Melber dares him to connect everything he can back to the cost of living. Yeah, right. But, yeah, it wasn't a secret.
I think what Republicans and Trump would tell anybody that would listen, oh, we want this guy to win so we can use him as his foil in every every district. And Senate Republicans had a memo today saying we're going to here is how every single person running against we're going to tie to Mamdani in some way. And.
I think the way it played out in New York, there's so many inputs that went into this. This is the highest turnout for a New York mayor's race since I think the Beatles were still a band. The selector was very different. Lots of things influenced it. Andrew Cuomo going around begging people to drop out, that helped him. But...
The premise of Trump criticizing Mamdani was often I don't like his policies and I will hurt the city and take its money away to punish him. Cuomo kind of went along with that, the whole protection racket idea of the president and saying he's going to eat you alive, but I know how to deal with them. And.
50 point something percent of voters said we're going to go with a young guy who wants to fight Trump. That feels like more normal politics to me. I feel like there has been a normalization of the idea that the president can stop funding, funding states and politicians he doesn't like, which is new. I don't remember Joe Biden saying, I don't like Ron DeSantis. Sorry about the hurricane.
I'm giving it to my friends.
Yeah, that is new. And I think it's interesting, you've been good at talking about this, about the backlash, like the kind of people being pissed that they're not getting their money and services. And MAGA thinking they can make this all part of some like imaginary internet war where they're owning people and dropping poop from airplanes and stuff. And like actual voters are like, wait a minute.
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Chapter 3: What does the backlash against Stephen Miller's immigration policies reveal?
The bridge isn't open. And so I want to get back to New York in a little bit. But we had to start with Zoran Troll and Grandpa Trump. The biggest picture, though, you know, you wrote this morning for 7-4, blowout state elections offer something for every Democrat. And I think that's true. I like the meta...
narrative here and i think that a lot of a lot of democrats a lot of people listen to this show a lot of people that have interest in like what direction the party goes like wanted to make yesterday kind of about the factional fights about the rise of the dsa or you know normie centrist candidates doing better in governor's races etc and like the reality i think was the
elections offered something for every democrat because the election was a reaction to a president that has not delivered on the economic promises that he made for people and there was a backlash across the board and obviously there's some differences various races we'll get into but there's an across-the-board backlash to costs continuing to be high in hispanic communities to the overreach especially to the overreach on immigration
And just a general sense of the enthusiasm, as is often the case in off year's elections, being on the side of the out party rather than the party in power. Would you agree with that? I kind of like there's one of these things where people like to say like Zoran type candidates couldn't have won in Virginia and and the other way around.
And I'm kind of like, I don't know, actually, I think I think Zoran probably would have won in Virginia and New Jersey and in a non sex pest way. You know, establishment Democrats who didn't like, you know, play footsie with Donald Trump probably could have won in New York City last night. And there's a big backlash against Trump generally.
Events change things. I'm not impugning what Mamdani did because it's historic. And he changed electorate. And I don't think any candidate added as many Democrats to the voter rolls as they campaigned. It's more than 150,000 people voted. joining the party to vote for Zoran successfully last night.
But yeah, it was different than the rest of these races because Sheryl and Spanberger, who won by landslides and like real landslides, not like 1.2 percent. But if you look at the swing state, yeah, no, like a real landslide, like one that carried along Democrats who did not think they were going to win their local races and They both ran overlapping campaigns that you set up pretty well.
Costs are too high. Donald Trump is hurting you on purpose through tariffs and through Doge firings and through canceling the gateway tunnel. And I'm not going to get distracted by other stuff. That was their campaigns. And I was writing another piece for the newsletter about.
We campaign reporters need to appreciate that our interests of writing interesting stories and new stuff every day or so are across purposes with candidates who want to be consistent. So I was noticing in the last week as I was in these states and last place I went to were New Jersey and New York.
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Chapter 4: How did redistricting impact the recent elections?
And finding it looked like a Democratic electorate looked like they were probably going to win that they didn't think they win by this much. And then I would see commentary that said, well, look at this boring Mikey Sherrill answer. Look at Abigail Spanberger having a long winded answer to something. And I was thinking, well, yeah, because they want to get to the cost issue.
They want to explain the cost they're talking about. And there was this idea also of magic that Trump was able to perform that Cittarelli might pull off to a lesser extent. Earl Sears could pull off. But sticking with Cittarelli. Hudson and Passaic County, Patterson, the Lake Union City, these places that were moving towards Trump, he really did campaign in those places.
His campaign bus, like the biggest picture on the bus was Chittarelli and North Bergen, which is a very Hispanic community surrounded by Hispanic voters. He put in the time. He got excitement when he was in the parades there, just got destroyed. And he was not able to convert those people who took a chance on Trump into Republican voters.
And if you're a Republican making maps and target lists for next year, assuming that the electorate is what it was in 2024, it's not going to be.
I want to go really deep in that because to me, I think actually bigger than the races themselves is the impact on this map and the redistricting and Trump's efforts to rejigger or some Democrats have said rig the midterms with the redistricting efforts. I think that took the biggest hit of all last night. But let's just go a little bit deeper on some of the things you said.
and some of these states looking at new jersey in particular and i will just say i will raise my hand as that's what i want to have you on you're actually you actually go to the states and follow the campaigns i'll raise my hand among the people who was a little frustrated with the cheryl and spanberger but i always said i always caveated i was like they're probably doing the right thing that they need to do to win in new jersey and virginia i was like i just need like it's this is about my emotional needs
And I need somebody to be excited about, you know? All my lived-out friends were so excited about Zoran. And I kind of came around on being excited to be against Zoran's haters. But I was like, I wanted somebody to be excited. And they weren't doing that because they were running discipline campaigns that were smart for an off-off-year election.
But to that point in New Jersey, Mikey ends up winning by 13th. Like, that's a bigger poll miss than the Trump poll miss for 2024 that people talk about. The idea that she'd win a double-digit victory, I think, exceeded even the most optimistic Ken Martin projection in New Jersey. What do you think that was? You talked a little bit about the canceled projects. You talked about the Hispanic vote.
Passaic County, which you mentioned, Cheryl wins by 15.
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Chapter 5: What can Mamdani teach Democrats about engaging voters?
That's the most Hispanic county. It's a county Trump flipped last time. Yeah. First Republican win in ages. He'd won it narrowly. Mikey is up by 15 as of this morning. What else do you attribute the big, big kind of surprising win for Cheryl?
Well, you're talking a little bit immigration and that that was part of it. So this is the first real test. We had the Wisconsin Supreme Court race. We've had these races in Iowa. We have not had until yesterday race with a large number of Hispanic voters where Republicans were doing a gut check on, OK, yes, He said mass deportation. It looks like this.
It looks like this ice center where the member of Congress is going to get arrested for resisting resisting arrest at a protest. And it looks like memes of Halo about how awesome it is to everything. We need to go into all of it. But. How much were his were Latino voters in the Northeast going to put up with that? The answer is not really much at all.
And Latino voters are very different and they come from different parts of the world to America around the country. Texas Latinos. There's I don't see evidence from there were just some ballot measures in Texas and constitutional amendments. You didn't see a shift to the to the left in Texas, but it was not a candidate shift.
This is the test we've seen of the Trump policy inaction over immigration that is actually removing not just criminals from the country, but people who've overstayed their visas and have not committed any other crime. We still have the ongoing birthright citizen case, right, which is going to blow up again next year. Or DACA kids. Yeah.
And in every way, the Stephen Miller policy of just trying to get immigrants out of the country. Obviously, I think probably frustrating to bulwark readers because you could say, like, didn't you guys look at the signs of the convention that this is their plan?
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Chapter 6: What role did Latino voters play in the election results?
Yeah, they put it right there on the sign, y'all. Yeah, I got pretty frustrated. We were doing frustration. There was a tweet about, I saw you also shared, about a South Asian precinct in New Jersey that went from Trump plus 20 to Sheryl plus 70. And it's a tiny precinct. But they had like 300 votes for Trump and 22 votes for Shittarelli. And it's like...
Y'all, recent immigrants, like we're telling you that it was not just going to be Trendaragua. But yeah, that part is frustrating. But it's noteworthy, though, because that was an important part of the Trump shift, right? Like not just with Hispanic voters, kind of across the board with recent immigrants.
And a more minor part, because this is Asians, but also Arab Americans. Yeah. Yeah. In 2024, Trump ran on, I'm going to bring peace to the Middle East. And he has got this deal in Gaza. I'm definitely not going to go in the rabbit hole of what the Gaza deal looks like, etc.
And those voters also kind of rented Trump for one election and then given the chance to vote on other issues with Gaza not top of mind, didn't vote for Republicans. They turned out they were very easy for Democrats to flip back. I think his numbers on foreign policy went up a little bit and then nothing else did. Like this is a little reminiscent of the George H.W.
Bush problem in the in the 90s. Great job on foreign policy. We don't care. Things cost too much. And that's certainly true for, yeah, first generation Americans who are also getting that they're getting more racist rhetoric from social media, from conservatives on social media than they would have before. I think just it has changed who is posting on it. People are bolder.
They're they're worried.
Look.
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Chapter 7: How are Republicans responding to the Democratic victories?
you've seen this just in, and I don't know if you've seen it in your reporting, but I've seen man on the street interviews from recent immigrants that are not Hispanic Latino, but they're like, I'm worried. I've seen examples of people being deported, you know, people getting papers checked and things of that nature. So I do think that
You know, a lot of these other communities are also like feeling in addition to like the racist social media stuff, like a little bit of fear now. And like, wait a minute, are these masked guys going to come for me and my family? Do I have to worry about that now? I think that's potentially having an impact, you know, even beyond the Hispanic community.
Yeah, and it hasn't solved the Democrats problem because I think. The question for them in 2028 will be, if we put you back in charge, do you let the border fly open again and people come into the country? That turns out to be unpopular. Can Democrats be trusted to enforce that? You've got Ruben Gallego, who was campaigning in New Jersey for Cheryl.
You've got some Democrats just moving on that issue, not to the far right, but moving to like 2012 Obama. Actually, maybe you needed a deporter in chief while you're also not... willy-nilly deporting everyone you can find in the country. So they're not there yet. They didn't solve their problems. It was just that there was a cost to the way Republicans have carried themselves.
And just the hubris, the focus they have from day to day is really not on issues that voters care much about. And they cannot stop gloating about enactment of their policies, even when they're not that popular. If I was listening to Republicans in D.C.,
Over the last week, I was hearing about Arctic Frost and investigations of the 2020 election and the plots to overturn it and hearing about James Comey and just the degree to which the Republican conversation is centered around Trump and his interest and not voters. That was not what it was in 2024.
I mean, he could go off on a tangent at a rally, but the whole party just got very confident that – Elections were like static and there were and there was they didn't really need to go into what voters cared about because Democrats were so weak.
Yeah, the vibes and just being out of touch with our voters. In some ways, it's a flip of how people felt about Democrats, right? Like where there's too much focus on some of the cultural issues, et cetera, right? It's like people are focused too much on Donald Trump's random obsessions rather than the things that people are upset about.
One thing that made me think about this yesterday, and it hadn't really occurred to me until I actually got the exit poll data.
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Chapter 8: What are the potential challenges for Republicans in upcoming elections?
Yeah, one of the things I always do in the Expo data is like, what was the most important issue for you? What did you vote for? Last year, as I was dealing with my, you know, PTSD from being in New York last November, I remember looking at that early exit, you know, not at the ballot number of Trump-Kamala, but at the, what is the issue that was most important to you?
And you look at those numbers. And last year, and it was like, you know, immigration was up there and crime and, and your economy, you figure that probably is cutting against, you know, the Democrats and you look at like abortion and democracy, you figure that's probably cutting towards, you know, that's right. Those are probably democratic issues. You just looked at it all.
And I looked at the jumble of issues and I was like, I don't know, this feels like a Trump jumble of issues that people care about. Yesterday, I was looking at the exit polls and they came out and the issues were like, economy, immigration, healthcare, democracy. And I looked at him and I was like, I wonder if any of these are Trump. What are the Earl Sears and Cittarelli people even saying?
Any basket of those issues could have been bad for him. And I think that kind of, to me, represented...
How they're in a bad place right now, just as a party politically, like it's not like, what would you say that they own issue wise, where you look at that and be like, oh, those people are coming up for Trump crime, I guess, maybe, but like, it's hard to even think about anything like you figure that immigration is probably cutting both ways at this point.
Yeah, and the salience of crime has been falling. You saw that with Mamdani's success. That was the first. But if you look at mayoral races that were not that competitive, but they got into the news. At Cincinnati, there was this drunk brawl at a jazz fest that got weeks of coverage on Fox News conservative media as Cincinnati falling apart at the seams. And J.D.
Vance's half-brother was the challenger to the mayor, lost by 56 points, I think. The mayor of Charlotte was facing re-election problems. We have one very easy. Poor J.D. Vance's half brother. He didn't do a lot for him. I think he posted he's a good guy and you should vote for him. But he wasn't out there campaigning for him.
J.D. is good at sucking up and riding the coattails of somebody that's on their way up. That's been his prime skill throughout life. And so he's not going to he's not grabbing onto a sinking stone just because he's blood.
That's true. He doesn't he doesn't like to endorse people who are not winning, even if they're related to him. Yeah, Charlotte, the mayor of Charlotte got reelected.
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