Can Trump really save the midterms for the Republicans?

0:00This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. The CIA has been carrying out covert operations around the world for decades. How has it shaped how people feel about the US? I'm Asma Khalid. And I'm Tristan Redman. And together we host the Global Story podcast from the BBC. As part of our series to mark the United States' 250th birthday, we're exploring the CIA's hidden history. Do you think the word of the United States will be trusted in years to come? For more, check out The Global Story on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts. I love Iowa, but I'm here because we're starting the campaign to win the midterms.

0:41We've got to win the midterms. That means Senate and it means House. Got to win them. Got to win them. That's what Donald Trump's going to be saying for nine months in advance of the big political event of 2026, the midterm elections coming in November. Can Republicans possibly hold on to the House and the Senate? What will it mean for Donald Trump's presidency if they don't? Welcome to AmeriCast. AmeriCast. AmeriCast from BBC News. When Donald Trump calls, they say, yes, sir. Right away, sir. Happy to lick your boot, sir. We are the sickest country in the world. Oh dear, are you worried that billionaires are going to go hungry?

1:25Of course the president supports peaceful protests. What a stupid question. Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein?

1:37Hello, it's Sarah in the BBC's Bureau in Washington. And it's Anthony right here next to Sarah in Washington, D.C. Now, right now, November seems quite a long way off, but it's going to come barreling at us very, very quickly. isn't it, when we've got these crucial midterm elections, absolutely vital for Donald Trump. And a little bit later, and we're really lucky because one of our podcast friends, Brian Lanza, is going to come and try and tell us what the Republican campaign will look like. He worked on Donald Trump's 2016 and 2024 campaign. So he's a great guy to talk to about this. But let's lay out exactly what the stakes are first, because it is hard, isn't it, for a sitting president to try and do well in midterm elections.

2:18Right. The stakes are very high. Control of the U.S. Congress is in play. Control of key governorships are in play. And the Republicans have an uphill battle traditionally, something that Donald Trump himself pointed to in a rally he held this week in Iowa. You know, the worst thing about the midterms is the fact that no matter what happens, the people that win the presidency, you win the even if you're a good president. I think we had the best first year of any president ever. Maybe they say. But even if you have any great. It's like in the last 50 years, they've won it twice. Can you believe it?

2:59Something happens as a screw turns with the voters. So even if it's a Democrat or Republican, whoever wins the presidency has a hard time with the midterm. I mean, I'm here because I love Iowa, but I'm here because we're starting the campaign to win the midterms. We've got to win the midterm. That means Senate and it means House. Got to win them. It's not the grandest sounding name for a set of elections, the midterms, is it? What's at stake, Anthony, I think, is all of the seats in the House of Representatives, a third of the seats in the Senate, And is it about a third of the governorships across America?

3:34That's right. And state legislatures, too, which is also important for determining policy in these states. The stakes are high. There's no doubt about it, because control of Congress right now is held by Republicans entirely. Democrats really don't have any hands on the levers of power. If they win one chamber or both chambers, they're going to be able to grind Donald Trump's legislative agenda to a halt. But more than that, they're going to be able to ramp up oversight of Donald Trump. They're going to be able to hold hearings, issue subpoenas, have investigations. They can make Donald Trump's life for the last two years of his presidency really difficult in the way they did for the last two years of his first term in office, where Democrats won control of the House of Representatives in January of 2019, and they impeached Donald Trump by the end of that year.

4:22Yeah, they would move to impeach him again, surely, wouldn't they, if they took control of either house? I think there's a lot of a lot of sentiment to do something like that, although they may start a little lower on and focus on people like Kristi Noem, the Homeland Security Secretary, which they think they might have a better chance of actually bumping out of power. They may have given up on impeaching Trump after two bites at it last time around. Is he right when he says sitting presidents, their own party very rarely wins the midterms? I know it's traditional that two years into your presidency, voters have maybe turned against you a bit.

4:53But is he exaggerating when he says you can just basically never win them as a sitting president? Very seldom. I'm not sure if the two times over the last 50 years is right, although I can think of two examples where the president's party did do better and pick up seats in midterm elections. One was in 2002 with George W. Bush. That was after the September 11th terror attacks. And the Republicans ran on national security and homeland defense and did better in those midterms. The other one, I think, was in 98 with Bill Clinton, the midterms in the second term of his presidency. And that was right in the midst of the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

5:32And House Republicans were in the process of impeaching. And while the Democrats didn't take control back of the House, they did pick up some seats. Those were the exceptions, though. The rule is that, as Donald Trump described, it is a pushback against the president and his party who control power. Or it is a way to put a check on a president who the public may think has overextended himself. And certainly across the country now, from Minnesota to Texas, we can see some very, very animated people in opposition to Trump's policies. It's not difficult to see how you would try and motivate them to get out and vote against what's happening.

6:10It's going to be a problem, though, isn't it, for Republicans that Donald Trump's name's not on the ballot, because there are a lot of people who do still support him, who still love him, but may not bother to turn out to the polls if they can't vote for Donald Trump himself, just some candidates that he's approved of. And actually his chief of staff, Susie Wiles, was talking about this the other day when she was on the MomView podcast. Typically, in the midterms, it's not about who's sitting at the White House. It's you localize the election and you keep the federal officials out of it. We're actually going to turn that on its head and put him on the ballot because so many of those low propensity voters are Trump voters.

6:48Yes, they are. And we saw a week ago Tuesday what happens when he's not on the ballot and not active. So I haven't quite broken it to him yet, but he's going to campaign like it's 2024 again. When she was saying a week ago Tuesday, she was talking to some of those off year elections where Republicans didn't really do that well last year. They didn't do that well. And in those off year elections in Virginia and New Jersey, the Democrats did quite well. And in some other, as we've discussed in the past, isolated little elections like some state level elections in Georgia, the Democrats outperformed prior prior results, particularly the 2024 results when Donald Trump was on the ballot.

7:27And if you look at special elections all through last year, special congressional elections, Democrats, even when they didn't win, they they did better than they did in 2024. They're by about 13 percent on average, which tells you exactly the headwinds that Republicans are going to be going into. If they hit this November with these midterm elections and do 13 percent worse than they did in 2024, they are definitely going to lose the House of Representatives. And it could very well put the Senate, which is a higher bar for the Democrats to try to take. but it could put the Senate in play. Yeah, because the margins are so incredibly tight at the moment.

8:02Now, they change a bit, don't they, in the House, because some people have resigned. What is the size of the Republican majority right now? I think it's about a two-seat majority in a 435-seat chamber. So that shows you how small it is. It doesn't take much to tilt it back to the Democrats. And there are seats that Democrats are targeting that Kamala Harris carried in 2024 that are controlled by Republican members of Congress. For instance, I believe Nebraska is one of them. There are some in California that have been redistricted, some in New York. Now the redistricting in Texas has made it likely the Republicans will pick up some seats there.

8:41But if this is a wave election, which we've seen in the past when there's an animated out-of-power party looking to get to the polls, if this is that wave election, then even these little redistricting things here and there and little details aren't going to matter. It's going to be such a route that the Democrats will be able to win, despite what the Republicans are trying to do. And as you say, it's harder for Democrats to try and take the Senate, but they've got a few interesting options because some big name popular Republican senators are retiring, are not running for re-election, aren't they?

9:15Which means that some of those races are a bit more open than they might have been, even in unusual states. Right. Tom Tillis in North Carolina, who has been an increasingly outspoken critic of Donald Trump, he's a Republican. He isn't running again. So that's an open seat in the swing state. Democrats have to win that, basically, if they want to be able to take control of the Senate. They'll have to pick up four seats to take control of the Senate because it's a 53-47 Republican majority and a tie would be broken by J.D. Vance because he's the vice president right now. So that's one. Susan Collins in Maine, she's running for re-election, but Maine is a more liberal state, and she has won against the odds in her past re-election campaigns.

9:55Maybe her luck runs out this time around. That gets to you to two. Then you have to start thinking about other states that are a little bit more of a reach and where they can pick up. And one of them is Joni Ernst's seat in Iowa, where Donald Trump was this week. She's not running for re-election. That seems like a reach. But in the past, Democrats have been able to be competitive in Iowa. Maybe Florida could turn around. Texas, John Cornyn, all of these would be mildly surprising, maybe even more than mildly surprising. But they're the kind of seats that Democrats would have to win to get those four flips.

10:29And it definitely means that they're going to have to find a way to kick out some incumbents, which is always harder. And then quite a lot of American pastors have been asking us whether there's any possibility Trump might try and cancel the midterm elections, which is a very interesting question. I mean, he, I think, was teasing when he told Reuters that he'd achieved so much during his first year in office that when you think about it, we shouldn't even have an election in 2026. And his press secretary rushed in and said that he was only joking. But there's been some interesting moves going on around electoral stuff.

11:04I've noticed that the Attorney General Pan Bondi is demanding entire voter rolls from states with all the details that normally the federal government wouldn't have access to about those voters. And in Georgia as well, I think just this week, haven't they seized a whole bunch of voter information from 2020? Yeah, the FBI went to Atlanta where they keep the ballots from 2020 and took them, had a warrant, went in, confiscated all of them. We're not sure what that investigation is related to, but it appears to be something related to trying to prove, once again, try to prove fraud in the 2020 election in Georgia, a state that Joe Biden narrowly won, although not the state that decided the election.

11:46It's still one that Donald Trump has been fixated on for the past six years. There is a possibility that Trump could try to make allegations of voter fraud, getting this voter roll data from all of these different states. If they're able to do it, they can look at the voter rolls and find people who are dead on them, find people who have moved. But it would allow Donald Trump to cast some doubt on the election results if we get to November and the Republicans don't do well. The other thing people are very worried about is this sense of whether it's the National Guard on the streets or ICE agents and all the pictures we've seen coming out of Minneapolis.

12:26But of course, that have been repeated with the National Guard in different cities, largely Democrat run cities and Democrat states across the country, that that sense of troops on the streets is potentially intimidating to Democratic voters. Right. You could see the kind of crackdowns we've seen in Minneapolis and elsewhere where they are pulling people off the streets, demanding citizenship identification. You do that outside a polling place. You even do that in immigrant neighborhoods during early voting or on Election Day. I think Democrats and critics could could say that that would have a chilling effect on turnout.

13:02And again, turnout is everything in a midterm election. So that might be a way for Donald Trump to use his authority to gain some sort of a partisan advantage. Canceling the elections. Well, the first thing to remember is that the states run these elections. It's not the federal government. Donald Trump could say the elections are off and the states would say, no, they're not. and open up the polling places and have voting. And it's not something that a president can just issue a decree that says we're suspending these elections. So that undercuts that fear, I believe. But there are, as I mentioned, things that Trump could do that would maybe push things a little his way.

13:43And I think that is a very real concern among Democrats. Yeah. Okay, let's try and drill down into what Donald Trump and the Republicans can do to maximize their chances, how they're going to run this campaign, basically for the next nine months. And so this is a great point to welcome back to America. Brian Lanza, who is a good friend of our podcast, and he can see inside the mind of Donald Trump's campaign because he was deputy communications director for Trump in his 2016 campaign and a senior advisor on the 2024 campaign. Hi, Brian. Welcome back. Great. Thank you for having me. It's been quite a year since I think we last spoke, Brian.

14:20What do you think is happening? What do you think the outlook is for the midterms now that Donald Trump has a year under his belt in his second term? I mean, the pace has been unrelenting. I think that's what we sort of take away from the last year. I mean, I think the midterms are going to be tough, right? They're always tough for the party in power, at least on the House of Representatives sides. The economy is not where it should be. It is better than what it was under Joe Biden. But President Trump made promises that it would be exponentially better. And so they have some work to do and some catching up to do.

14:50But at the end of the day, it was always going to be an uphill battle. The fact that there's question marks about the economy makes it harder. And then you throw in what was President Trump's signature issue in the rally to the MAGA base, which is immigration. At least visually, it's turning into a liability. So it's certainly the start of an interesting year. Plenty of time to turn it around. But if the election were held today, I wouldn't have a good feeling about it. You know, we listened to a Susie Wiles clip earlier talking about their campaign strategy. And she said that she was going to get Donald Trump out there campaigning nonstop like this was a presidential election, usually in midterms when the president isn't all that popular.

15:31They kind of disappear. That doesn't seem like the strategy now. They want Donald Trump front and center. Is that a good idea, do you think? I mean, he's front and center regardless. I think we learned that in 2018, that whether he's on the ballot or not on the ballot, you know, about Donald Trump. And he is his best messenger. He is the best counterpuncher out there in American politics. And he is the contrast, right? I think Democrats, what they're talking about now, the election for them isn't about the economy. It's not about affordability. It's not about pricing. For them, it's about impeachment.

16:04And the more you have President Trump out there, the more it's going to trigger the Democratic base to stop lying behind their other political arguments and Trump out there sort of makes them address, you know, the election for Democrats is solely about impeachment. And that's a political problem for them. People want more than just divided, frozen government and an impeachment every month. So Donald Trump has been getting out there and he delivered what was basically a campaign speech in Iowa earlier this week on one of the things you say that's all important on the economy. And I wonder if you think he's got the message right on this.

16:37Let's listen to what he had to say. so they say oh affordability let's vote for the democrats it's no affordability they caused a tremendous price increases it was caused by the worst inflation we've ever had and they come up with this word affordability and i saw it even although you're not hearing it so much anymore you know why because the prices are coming down so much they don't want it to be an election based on lower prices but we're bringing down the lower i like that term better it's a lower prices. We're bringing them down. Brian, to me, that sounds as though President Trump is trying to tell people that they're better off than they feel, that the evidence of their own wallets or bank balances is lying to them, which is kind of what Joe Biden tried to do before 2024, and that didn't work.

17:21No, listen, I think the differences here are, you know, democratic policies as a whole drive up costs. We know this. It's not a secret. So when President Trump says affordability conversation is a scam. 100 % is a scam in the sense that Democrats don't care about affordability. They never have. So it is ironic for us, observers of campaigns who work with the president, to hear the media prop up and the Democrats prop up the conversation of affordability when they've never cared about the issue before. And evidence is that they don't care about it now. And they want to double down on Joe Biden's policies, which led to an affordability crisis.

18:00That's a sophisticated argument. I'll put it to you that a lot of voters are going to take this much more simplistically. And as you say, prices are still high. There are things people can't afford. They're going to blame the president or the party who has been in power for almost two years by the time they go to the ballot box. If they're feeling the squeeze, they are not going to blame Democrats for it. They're going to blame the people who are running the economy. Well, I think you have to look at some things like energy prices are cheaper today than what they were under Joe Biden. Inflation is lower today than it was under Joe Biden.

18:27Eggs are lower. The thing is, is there are costs throughout the entire ecosystem of family that are cheaper today than they were under Joe Biden. However, things could get cheaper faster. I think that's the challenge that President Trump had, is he made it sound like he could return the great economy of Trump one with the flip of a switch. And he set that expectation. We set that expectation. It's taken longer than we wanted. And so President Trump, when he's out there campaigning, the campaign is against ultimately himself. He said it was going to be fast and it's taking a little bit longer. But let's be clear.

19:02The alternative is what we're experiencing in Virginia. Higher taxes, less affordability. That is what the alternative is when you vote for Democrats. So is it a messaging problem? Donald Trump has said previously that maybe he needs better messengers, better people to come out with a better message. Or is it a policy problem? Do the Republicans need to do something more to address these issues? Well, let's be clear. the best thing that President Trump can do with respect to affordability is choose a new Fed chairman. That new Fed chairman is going to have an opportunity, I think, either in May and July, most likely in June, actually, to drop interest rates.

19:39Does he drop at a point? Does he drop at a full point? Or does he go full MAGA and drop interest rates two points? That will supercharge the economy overnight. That will basically make borrowing cheaper than it's been in probably 10 years, and the affordability crisis, quite frankly, disappears. Now, there's long-term consequences for that, but that's post-election. I mean, the long-term concerns that you mentioned about cutting interest rates are that it'll drive up inflation, which will drive up prices, and is exactly the opposite of what Donald Trump wants. Listen, right now, what I've learned, and I've got a minor in economics, which means nothing, right?

20:16But what we've learned over the last years under Trump's stewardship of the U.S. economy is the economists get it wrong all the time. They have the worst record under President Trump when it comes to making these predictions of what's going to happen. I remember during Trump 1 when economists said we were going to drive up inflation because of the tariff policy. That didn't happen. Yeah, they said that again last year. Yeah, and they said that again. I mean, so you have to be careful when you listen to economists because economists, you know, they're on the side of every issue and they tend to be wrong when it comes to President Trump.

20:49We don't know what's going to happen if you drop 2%. We have theories of what might happen, but we've also learned that those people who create those theories tend to be wrong more than right. So the other big issue you identified that will be on the ballot for the midterms is immigration crackdown. And obviously that's front and center of people's minds because of the images that we've been seeing coming out of Minneapolis. Is that a real problem for Republicans come November? The images are terrible. There's an American citizen that's dead who, by every visualization, every video we've seen, should not be dead.

21:24Our hearts goes out to him and his family. This is a tragic thing that took place. It's clearly a result of Customs and Border agents not having the proper training of dealing with crowd control. But that goes to the larger issue. Why are we in this dilemma? I refer to this as a blue state rebellion when it comes to immigration policies because what you don't see is you don't see red states having these same situations. You don't see red state governors saying don't cooperate with ICE. You don't see red state mayors saying don't cooperate. They actually cooperate with ICE. So a normal ICE or Customs and Border task or action item is they pull up on a residence, they knock on the door, they identify who the illegal alien is, and they put that person into custody.

22:04And local law enforcement does crowd control because local law enforcement is trained to do crowd control. That is their primary training. What you have in places like Minnesota, what you have in blue states is you don't have the local support. Customs and Borders and ICE doesn't have the local support of law enforcement to do the crowd control. So you're bringing in supremely inexperienced people who've never had the training for crowd control because Customs and Borders is far different than controlling a crowd. And they're using aggressive tactics. They're using the tactics that actually work at the border but don't work in our cities.

22:37And the reason those tactics are being used today is because of a blue state rebellion. where governors and mayors don't want to cooperate in enforcing federal law and enforcing what the people voted for in 2005 in their election. They said we wanted deportation. We didn't hide what we wanted. What they didn't say is we want deportation, but we want blue states to rebel. They voted for deporting the worst of the worst, right? They wanted people. No, that's your messaging. What we always said is we will start with the worst of the worst, but we're deporting every illegal alien out there. so when you listen to donald trump he says we're getting the worst of the worst now they did have signs at the convention saying mass deportation now and we never hid behind it and people were saying and journalists were saying that means millions of people being rounded up that means it's going to be more than just criminals but there are i think i think you have to acknowledge there are people who think this is going too far and on one hand deporting a convicted rapist getting him out of this country may be a good thing but what about About deporting a five-year-old child at a bus stop or your local gardener or someone who works in your school.

23:44People who have no criminal records beyond just violating immigration law. Those weren't the kind of people that they had in mind when they voted on immigration. When you say they, I make the case that half the electorate exactly knew what we were going to do. We didn't hide from it. We had signs that said mass deportations. I was on this network. I was on various networks explaining how it was going to work. We're going to start with divorce. of the force, we're going to assess, and then we're going to continue to the next phase. I'm sorry. These are enforcement actions. These are laws that are in our books.

24:13We had a Democratic president under Barack Obama. We had a Democratic supermajority or a veto-proof majority under Barack Obama, and we had a Democratic House. They never passed anything to address these things. It was clearly never a priority for them. This is the net effect of them doing nothing and policy not sort of marrying up with what the electorate wants. But the reality is, is the policy is what we're fighting for, and it's what's being implemented. And whether it's a five-year-old who is left at a bus stop or in the process of being deported, if policymakers wanted to be differently, they should change it.