Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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My pet theory right now is that Donald Trump is not trying to win the midterm election. I'm not saying he's trying to lose it exactly. I just don't think he cares. What he cares about is controlling the Republican Party. The Republican Party is his power base. The Republican Party is his protection. The Republican Party is how he can wield power far into the future, long after his presidency.
And so control of it is what he's prioritizing. I call this a theory, but it's more like a hypothesis. It is predictions. You can test them. Trump is more unpopular at this point in his second term than basically any of his modern predecessors. The midterm elections, they're less than six months away. He could easily lose the House. He could actually lose the Senate now. So what is he doing?
Well, if he wanted to win the midterms, he'd be moving to the center. He'd be focusing on the things that Americans are angry about, disappointed in him about. He'd be supporting the strongest Republicans in contested races and doing everything he possibly could to bolster Republicans in vulnerable states and districts. He's not doing even a little bit of that. Not even a bit.
Instead, he's doing the opposite. He's announcing a $1.8 billion slush fund that appears designed to pay out to January 6th rioters. He endorsed the scandal-plagued, very controversial Ken Paxton over John Cornyn in Texas, giving Democrats a real chance at winning a seat that should be way out of reach for them.
He helped primary Thomas Massey, the House Republican, who released the Epstein files. He defeated Bill Cassidy, the Louisiana senator, who voted to impeach him in his first term. He is attacking Brian Fitzpatrick, one of the very, very, very few House Republicans representing a district that voted for Kamala Harris. He's threatening to escalate the Iran war.
And when asked whether he is worried about Americans' finances, about their pocketbooks, about their cost of living, here is what he said.
Mr. President, to what extent are American financial situations motivating you to make a deal? Not even a little bit. The only thing that matters when I'm talking about Iran, they can't have a nuclear weapon. I don't think about American's financial situation. I don't think about anybody. I think about one thing. We cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon. That's all.
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Chapter 2: Why doesn't Trump seem to care about winning the midterms?
The point isn't just to defeat Massey or Cassidy or Cornyn or any of them. It's to scare every Republican left in Congress. To make sure they know that Donald Trump would gladly destroy each and every one of them personally. That he would gladly burn the entire Republican Party to the ground. If that's what it took to save himself.
I thought it would be interesting to hear how this looks to someone whose business has been winning elections for the Republican Party, particularly Senate elections. Liam Donovan is a Republican strategist and a president at Targeted Victory, a Washington public affairs and digital marketing firm.
He's worked on the National Republican Senatorial Committee and also for Texas Senator John Cornyn, and his political commentaries appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other publications. As always, my email, EzraKlanshow at NYTimes.com. Liam Donovan, welcome to the show.
Good to be here. Thanks for having me.
So we're here. Trump is now under 40% in a bunch of different polls, more unpopular at this point in his term than basically any of his modern predecessors. Let's start with him. Why is he down there?
I think if you think about the mood of the country that produced the comeback of Donald Trump, putting together the coalition that he did, that was predicated on a rejection of the status quo and the bet that Donald Trump will be able to return us to the economy and maybe the vibes of pre-COVID 2020. Of course, that's much harder to do than it is to talk about.
And I think this is fundamentally about frustrations of how difficult some of these problems are to tackle, an electorate that is not really looking to be told that everything is going well. And then when you compound that with some of the policy choices that have been made,
that I think might prove to be wise in the longer run, but there are legacy-minded moves, not immediate-term electoral plays.
Was it so much harder? I always feel like you could imagine a Trump administration, second term, that sealed the border, but didn't do the aggressive internal ICE and CBP enforcement so you didn't have things like the Battle of Minnesota, that did not, say, go to war in Iran, that did not do the tariffs.
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Chapter 3: What is Trump's strategy regarding the Republican Party?
say, 48 percent, something like that, the coalition that got him there. So in that sense, it's it's a hard cap. And so, like, you need to almost grade on a little bit of a curve in terms of where these things are. That said, the president's approval rating, I don't care which party you're from, wants to be above 40. It wants to be at 42, 43. That is your firm base.
What we're seeing here is that there are elements of the Republican coalition that consider themselves Republican who are disillusioned for one reason or another. Either they are anti-war or skeptical of foreign entanglements. Maybe they are simply upset about the cost of living. They don't like tariffs, what have you. They just don't like the way things are going.
I think that is the layer that is the easiest to imagine getting back. And if we're looking forward to, OK, how does this get back to a place where Republicans stand to have an OK or like just a par midterm? It's that he floats back up above 40 because that's kind of where these people want to be. They want to be given a reason to like Donald Trump.
They want to be given a reason to vote for Republicans.
So why doesn't Donald Trump want to give them that reason? This is where I wanted to get us to, this question of agency, because he could get some of them back. And I always took Trump as somebody who cared on some level about his popularity and who has a real sensitivity to the whims and wins of public opinion.
But as his numbers have fallen in the second term, he seems to me to be going on to tilt. He's doing this $1.8 billion slush fund to hand out to people convicted around January 6th or who he feels were the victim of Biden-era lawfare. He is talking about re-escalating the Iran war. He is intervening in a bunch of Republican primaries to purge people who opposed him in one way or another.
He's not doing the things that you might imagine a president worried about losing a midterm would do. He's not doing a big pivot to the center. He's not trying to avoid certain kinds of controversy. He seems like he doesn't care. Why do you think that is?
Well, I think we got to step back for a minute and think about how we got here. How did Donald Trump get the nomination in the first place? And it was, in a sense, running against the institutional Republican Party, running against the establishment. The fact that he doesn't, you know, find himself aligned with the broader forces of the party and that that's not his goal.
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Chapter 4: What are the implications of Trump's endorsements in Republican primaries?
primary objective. He's not of the party. That's not what drives him. That's not his imperative. That's different than any president I think we've ever seen, maybe in both parties, but certainly in the Republican Party. And we saw it in 2018. I mean, I think he went on a victory lap the day after the election, even though it was rough, dunking on members that didn't stay closer to him.
So I think flash forward, and I think that lesson's been learned. I think people realize you have the our next year name. You're going to kind of, by and large, own what the president is doing. So you need to make the best of that. And going against him, picking fights with him, except in very rare exceptions, does not redound to your electoral benefit.
So that's true, but it doesn't necessarily answer the question of Trump himself.
Chapter 5: What are the potential paths for Democratic victories in the upcoming elections?
So as you mentioned, and I think this is an important point to expand on a little bit, there's a history here. 2018 Republicans under Trump do terribly in the midterms, but Trump comes out the next day and is excited about some of the ones who opposed him who lost.
2022, Donald Trump is not in office anymore, but he exerts a lot of control over Republican primaries, and you end up with candidates like Blake Masters and Dr. Oz and Carrie Lake. And Republicans lose a bunch of very big and very winnable races.
Right now, you see Trump intervening in places like Texas with Ken Paxton in ways that at the very least create the possibility that Republicans will lose some key races that they could have otherwise won.
So I take your point that Donald Trump does not come from the institutional Republican Party, but he seems to me to care more about the control he has over Republicans than the control Republicans under him have over Washington.
Like he is running a risk here of losing the Senate, but with, I guess, more control over the rump Republican senators when he could be trying to win the Senate, but have a couple of people who might be more willing to oppose him. So does he want to control Congress or control the Republican Party?
I think there's something to the point. I do think he's more committed to and sensitive to the risk of not having control than he was four years ago, eight years ago, whatever. Time has no meaning anymore. I think that's where the project, and we can get into this, of the kind of structural gambit of trying to create a more resilient map for Republicans in the House. The redistricting efforts.
That doesn't happen if the president doesn't care. That doesn't happen if the president doesn't believe that a Democratic majority could do him damage. Like, let's think about Indiana, where it's like, those guys, what was their sin? Their sin was, well, one, not listening to the White House and doing what they said to do, but two, that was- On not doing the redistricting efforts.
But what's the interest of redistricting? The interest of the redistricting is maintaining congressional majority. So like in that case, his priority was trying to win more seats. Is that self-interested? Sure. But it wasn't punishing them for going against him. It was punishing them for going against what he saw as the interests of the party. So I think that's your signal right there.
In the Senate, I'd actually push back and say this is something the Republican Party has had to learn a number of times over. If you think back, I mean, my time at the Republican Senate Committee was 2010, when it was a great cycle, but they left a great deal on the table. Because of the Tea Party primaries. Picking back candidates, not coordinating, and it took them again.
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Chapter 6: How does Trump's unpopularity affect Republican candidates?
Every Democrat is crawling over broken glass to go vote for Democrats for dog catcher if it means sticking it to to Donald Trump. You know, generic ballots, another one where I think maybe that's that might be the interesting delta there is Democrats only get 48 percent on the generic ballot, which is, of course, a good number. It's significantly higher than what Republicans have.
But there's a delta there of about 10 percent of voters there. who say they disapprove of the job Donald Trump is doing, but they're not yet willing to say, I would prefer a generic Democrat in the vote for Congress. And so I think that's the big question over the next six months is, what's more likely? Does Donald Trump's approval rebound such that those people go and vote Republican?
Do they stay home altogether or do they just say this is I'm not voting for this? I want to check and end up saying, yes, I will vote for that.
Well, you could also think about the 2022 scenario here, which is, you know, Joe Biden's approval rating was not quite as bad as Donald Trump's is, but it was bad. And Democrats are pretty freaked out about a red wave going into the midterm election. And it didn't really end up coming to pass that Biden's approval rating was not that correlated with Democratic performance.
Do you think there's a possibility that happens here? That's the best case scenario.
I mean, I think the factor that. 2022 kind of rhymes with this. That was the first time we were in this particular map. And of course, there have been changes to the margins with this mid-decade redistricting. But what we found in 2022, 2024, and we'll see about 2026 is this is a really resilient map. There's not as much, you know, a pool of competitive seats.
And so even on a really good night, I mean, 2022 is instructive. Republicans won the popular House vote by a significant margin and yet only netted something like 10 seats.
Because we've redistricted districts out of competition.
That's right. What a wonderful way to run a democracy. And in the meantime, Democrats were able to otherize these candidates, make them weird. I mean, right. Like Blake Masters.
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Chapter 7: How do the approval ratings impact the political landscape?
So Alaska, they got Mary Patola, former House members there. How do you see that one?
So I think Alaska has been another one where, like, I've seen this movie before. I mean, there was a bit on Twitter in whatever it was, 2022, like, don't sleep on Alaska. It's always the one that it's a different state. It's a differentiated state where it's a relatively small electorate. interesting demographics. There's a there's a blue collar, you know, piece to it.
And they've shown a propensity to, you know, support Democrats, whether that's Mark Begich and go back to Tony Knowles, Peltola herself in that in that House race. So there's enough variance there that there's opportunity. I'd argue Dan Sullivan is
is a squeaky clean incumbent Marine vet, you know, to the extent that he had any challenges, it was probably met at the original threshold when he beat Mark baggage in 14. Um, it's hard to beat an incumbent period. I think the hopes that Democrats have are based on the fact that, well, pill toll one in whatever it was in the special election. Uh, then she won again in, uh, 22. Um, uh,
So that she's got this edge in ranked choice voting. I think that's another thing that Democrats need to think about. There's this notion that ranked choice voting inherently benefits Democrats. And there might be cases where that's the case. It certainly was the case with Peltol in the first place. But why was that? It's because Democrat or Republicans were divided.
You had two flavors of Republicanism in literally Sarah Palin against Trump.
Why do you say the name of the person it's against? But we should just mention as a background here, Alaska is a weird system where four people advance. And so then you have ranked choice voting in the general against four candidates. It's not the way people normally think these elections where there's really just two candidates.
That's right. And there's a baggage scion. So just like these names kind of weave in and out of Alaska politics. But the first time he ran, it was against Sarah Palin. And in the immediate context of ranked choice voting and those preferences, there were enough divisions on the Republican side that Peltol was able to sort of triangulate and become the moderate middle of two Republicans ends up.
Winning that and then holding it in that next in that in that next general election when it was a straight up race against baggage when he came back, she lost. So I don't want to say she's not the absolute strongest candidate Democrats could have put up. She absolutely is strong.
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