00:08:28 · Ron Brownstein, S0
[00:08:28] S2: I've called it for months the Casablanca election because the fundamental things apply. And the most fundamental thing in modern midterm elections is that views of the incumbent president is the single most important factor. [00:08:41] S0: In the outcome. [00:08:42] S2: And whatever else was going on in Michigan all year, I have felt that the undertow of Trump disapproval made it unlikely that Mike Rogers was going to get over the top. And, you know, we saw in Michigan, I think it was 60% of voters disapproved. [00:08:57] S0: Let's see, let's see the exact number. [00:08:58] S2: 60% of voters disapproved of Trump's performance in the voter poll. [00:09:02] S0: And 81% of them voted for El-Sayed. And that is the basic story. That is the story, guys, nationwide. [00:09:10] S2: You know, at five o'clock, when the networks put up the very first result from the voter poll, which is kind of the successor to the exit poll, and it said 62% of voters disapproved. [00:09:22] S0: Of Trump's performance nationwide.
00:09:22 · S0, Ron Brownstein, Kailey Leinz
[00:09:22] S0: Of Trump's performance nationwide. [00:09:23] S2: At that point, it really was only a question of how much, not whether, Republicans would face a resounding defeat. you know, 84% of those people who disapproved of Trump voted Democratic, according to the poll for the House. And we saw in every state that Democrats flipped, every Republican held Senate seat, the Democrats flipped, a majority of voters disapproved of Trump, including in states where he won 55% or the vote or more just two years ago, Ohio, Texas, Iowa, Kansas, South Carolina, that level of disapproval was just an insurmountable undertow for Republicans. [00:09:57] S3: OK, so if your core thesis here, Ron, is that this fundamentally was about Trump, do we learn anything from the fact that a progressive like El-Sayed was able to win in a purple state of Michigan? Because I'm sure progressives are going to try to claim, look, we can do it. This is a winning strategy. Is that the actual lesson that should be learned? [00:10:18] S0: Well, we're going to have to study the results. [00:10:20] S2: But, you know, it is one thing to win in a purple state in a moment where the national environment is like plus 11 or plus 12 for Democrats. And it's another thing to potentially win it in a more neutral environment in 2028. [00:10:34] S0: You know, El Sayed didn't really. [00:10:36] S2: Underperform among voters who disapprove of Trump relative to other Democrats around the country. [00:10:42] S0: I mean, Troy Jackson was similar. kind of situation.
00:10:42 · S0, Ron Brownstein
[00:10:42] S0: I mean, Troy Jackson was similar. kind of situation. [00:10:45] S2: Peggy Flanagan in Minnesota may have underperformed a little, but they won in an environment when the whole field was tilted pretty dramatically toward Democrats. Whether that means AOC can win Michigan in a more even environment in a presidential race, when more of those culturally conservative non-college voters are likely to come out, that's a whole different issue. But there's no question that in this election, disappointment, disenchantment with Trump's results over his two years was the dominant factor. [00:11:18] S0: And it really outweighed everything else. [00:11:20] S2: In addition to 62 percent of voters disapproving of him, I'm just struck that in this voter. [00:11:25] S0: Poll, two thirds of America, two thirds of. [00:11:27] S2: Voters said his tariffs and his overall economic agenda did more to harm than help the economy. And again, that is a very hard undertow to swim away from if you're a Republican candidate. [00:11:40] S0: And all of them never tried over the two years. [00:11:42] S2: They left their fingerprints on all the policies that Americans opposed, the war, the tariffs, the Medicaid cuts, and they lashed themselves to Trump in a way that made it very easy for Democrats to tie them to his unpopularity.
00:11:42 · Ron Brownstein, David Gura, S0, Adam Hodge
[00:11:42] S2: They left their fingerprints on all the policies that Americans opposed, the war, the tariffs, the Medicaid cuts, and they lashed themselves to Trump in a way that made it very easy for Democrats to tie them to his unpopularity. [00:11:54] S4: Ron, I want to ask you about the white working class. And I think for the last decade, Democrats have been tying themselves in knots after the 2016 election, trying to figure out if they could regain support from that part of the electorate. Curious how you see that story developing over the course of tonight. Seems like Republicanism, as it's evolved, really had kind of intertwined itself with Trumpism. Where are we in that revolution? [00:12:16] S0: Where are we in that evolution. [00:12:17] S5: I should say? [00:12:18] S4: And so what does it say about the the the ability of the Democratic Party to get votes back from the white working class in this country? [00:12:25] S2: On a national basis, guys, they only made modest gains among white working class voters, but they did make slightly larger gains. in the Midwest and Plains states that were at the tipping point here. In Michigan, Kansas, Iowa, they gained a little more than they did nationally. But non-college whites, that white working class, is inexorably shrinking as a share of the electorate, two to three points. [00:12:49] S0: Every four years.
00:12:49 · S0, Ron Brownstein
[00:12:49] S0: Every four years. [00:12:51] S2: And I thought even more important was what happened tonight with the non-white working class, because, you know, that demographic contraction of the key Republican groups, working class whites and evangelical whites, really puts Republicans in a long-term demographic squeeze. Trump pointed to a way out of that squeeze in 2024 when he dramatically improved his performance among non-white voters, particularly those without college degrees. He won about 40 percent of them, according to the Pew Research Center, more than double what he won in 2016. But those gains were really what were vaporized tonight. And if you look at the results among Latino voters, Asian-American voters, black men, young men, all the groups that moved toward Trump in 24, all of them swung back toward Democrats. They didn't swing all the way back to where they were in the Obama years. But essentially what we saw tonight was an erasure of all the gains Trump made with those groups from 20 to 24 and without improved performance among those growing groups. That squeeze comes back into play because even though Republicans remain very strong among those non-college whites, even though they suffered only modest erosion among them, the longer term reality is that they are a smaller share of the electorate every two years. [00:14:06] S0: Than they were before.
00:14:06 · S0, Kailey Leinz, Ron Brownstein
[00:14:06] S0: Than they were before. [00:14:07] S3: Well, so let's look forward two years to 2028, because that cycle begins tomorrow. Let's be real, Ron. And as you point to the Obama years, when he was able to pick up Iowa, and we now have a Democrat winning state ride, two of them in Iowa in the Senate and gubernatorial races, when we've also seen Democrats win in Kansas, once again in Ohio, in South Carolina. How does this fundamentally reshape in Texas? Yes, how could I forget the electoral college picture that we will be looking at two years from now? [00:14:36] S2: I was at Lloyd Bentsen's ranch with Michael Dukakis in 1980, the last time a Democrat won a Senate seat. I'm pretty sure it was because of the LBJ law that allowed Bentsen to run both for vice president and Senate. [00:14:49] S0: Well, look, first of all, even a victory of. [00:14:52] S2: This magnitude in a midterm does not guarantee victory. success for the party out of the White House in the presidential race two years later. [00:14:59] S0: But it is also true that every.