9/30/26: Dems Surge Ahead Of Midterms, MAGA Abandons Trump, Jack Smith Chaotic Testimony

0:00This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human. Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin Unfiltered podcast? Here's what you missed. There should not be a single law enforcement agency that does not have body cameras. It's real. Black farmers have been under attack. This is just the latest example of them just slapping DEI on anything. It's raw. And I'm sitting here going, they are playing y 'all for fools. Catch Roland Martin's daily commentary on the Black Information Network. And download Roland Martin Unfiltered on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey guys, Ready or Not 2024 is here, and we, here at Breaking Points, are already thinking of ways we can up our game for this critical election.

0:43Emily Jashinsky:We rely on our premium subs to expand coverage, upgrade the studio, add staff, give you guys the best independent coverage that is possible. If you like what we're all about, it just means the absolute world to have your support. But enough with that, let's get to the show.

0:59Emily Jashinsky:Well, Donald Trump was asked yesterday after the big AI meeting we covered earlier in the show if he thinks all this data center support, bear hugging, will hurt Republicans in the midterm elections. Here's how he replied. Mr. President, are you concerned at all that your continued support of data centers could hurt Republicans in the midterms? I just have to do what's right. All I can tell you is that these big, powerful, very rich, very smart companies are going to be making massive contributions to communities, individual people within the community. And it's going to be really partnership.

1:31We talked about it. They're going to be forming partnerships with communities. They're going to have they're going to take something that people don't understand and they're going to let them understand it. But they're going to form partnerships within the communities. That's going to be so good for the people.

1:45Emily Jashinsky:OK, well, meanwhile, it's looking bleak. Obviously, we've covered that many times here. in the midterm. Maybe that's why it's looking bleak. I don't know. Actually, I sat down for, well, I didn't sit down. It was over the phone, but I sat down at least metaphorically with Dan Osborne for a profile in UnHerd that ran yesterday. And one of the interesting things he told me is that he thinks things are changing in rural Nebraska, particularly related to any ag-adjacent communities that are really, really upset about the Argentinian beef imports. And obviously, that's just part of the cauldron of things that's making people annoyed with all of this.

2:25Emily Jashinsky:But Trump seems to be picking up on exactly what Osborne is picking up on because he's heading to Nebraska. Nebraska, we're talking about, like, we're talking about practice? No, we're talking about our playoffs. We're talking about Nebraska in late September. It's almost October. The tear sheet we can put up from the Omaha World Herald is Trump coming to Nebraska next week to rally Republicans for Pete Ricketts. I believe Trump won Nebraska in 2024 by some 20 points, something like that. So this is absolutely devastating for Republicans that you have to be competing in Nebraska against an independent candidate, who, by the way, as Osborne pointed out to me in our conversation, there's a massive fundraising discrepancy between him and John Ossoff.

3:11Emily Jashinsky:Like, he's not getting Ossoff levels of money. He's not getting Tallarico levels of money because he's running as an independent And yes, Ossoff voted for the Lincoln Riley Act, as Julian over at Dropsite got him to comment on recently. So Tallarico has obviously tried to walk back some of his cultural positions. They're not like Bernie Sanders, obviously. But at the same time, Osborne saying, I'm out here not running as a Democrat and I'm not getting the money that Democrats would get. And even then, the president is having to go to Nebraska, Ryan. Yeah, polls show that Osborne remains either competitive or ahead of Pete Ricketts.

3:49And Trump is going to a very Trump-friendly part of Nebraska. But as you saw, the article ran in the Omaha World-Herald, like, the whole state's going to know that he's there. Like, you can't just sneak in the super red part of Nebraska and nobody else know. So and, you know, it shows that Osborne's argument that Ricketts is tied at the hip to Trump remains true, that Ricketts is unable to run away from that. Wanted to get your quick take on Osborne after talking to him. And you've talked to a bunch on this show as well. But I like the kind of opening anecdote from Emily's piece. She writes about she asked him about gender identity and Title IX and how it applies to universities.

4:35And he's like, what on earth are you talking about?

4:38Emily Jashinsky:I have no idea what you're talking about. So, yeah, what how do you feel like he kind of meets the kind of cultural moment politically? That moment I thought was interesting from a cultural perspective, but also really from a media perspective and that, you know, better than I do. it was a pretty basic question about if you're a senator would you vote to confirm an education secretary that rolled back all of the trump rollbacks of the obama era dear colleague letter that said you know already we all lost like 99 of people but we all here know the story right like if you like basically the only because i've been on this show do i know yeah but it is letters and the education department under obama a lot of the bathroom and locker room stuff came because they changed it with a dear colleague letter.

5:23Emily Jashinsky:And so every time there's an education secretary confirmation over the last 10 years, it's a big question as to whether they say that Title IX, when it says on the basis of sex in Title IX, does it mean sex or does it mean sex plus gender identity? Do you have to read gender identity into sex in Title IX? And that's always a huge thing with education secretary confirmations. And he just flat out was like, I have no idea what you're talking about. And I think it's interesting from a media perspective, because, again, you and I both know candidates used to be trained to the point where you would never, ever respond to a question like that.

5:55Emily Jashinsky:They had the little fact sheets that they'd memorized and they were on a script. And even if they were not aware of the answer to a question, they would never say, like, what the hell are you talking about? Especially on something like that. And he then pivoted to saying, I don't really, like, that's not what I think most people care about in my state. He was like, I think, he said, it doesn't sound like something I would support. He said, on the other hand, we have all of these people who can't pass basic math tests for plumbing apprenticeships in Omaha. I think it was what he was talking about.

6:24Emily Jashinsky:And he was like, the quality of education is what's important to me. I don't think I would support that, but I also feel like we have a massive quality problem that we should be focusing on more. So I even think from a media perspective, you can see how he's just a totally different breed of candidate that we're much more likely to have, I think, be common over the next 10 years. and it's kind of refreshing to be honest that he didn't pretend to know the answer and that he wasn't reading off of a script. He just kind of like said what he thought. And meanwhile, CNN's Manuraju caught up with his opponent, Pete Ricketts, whose dad founded Ameritrade and asked him about his support for the Iran war and what it's doing to people back in Nebraska.

7:04Osborne kind of mocked his answers here. We can roll some of that.

7:13Is it time for the president to bring the Iran war to an end? A country that chants death to America cannot be allowed to have a nuclear weapon.

7:25What about all the impact on your constituents, higher gas prices and all the rest? There is no doubt that higher gas prices and higher diesel prices are having a big impact on Nebraska families. It's bringing a squeeze on everybody's budget. Certainly our farmers and ranchers are feeling it The country the chance death to America cannot be allowed to have an uber weapon

7:50So Emily I think Pete Ricketts is gonna need to do a little bit better than that like the rest of the Republican Senate class or the wannabe Senate class like Ashley Hinson in Iowa Mike Rogers in Michigan They're all making noises about how the war needs to come to an immediate end whereas Ricketts seems a little bit more comfortable than you'd expect from somebody facing such a formidable challenge and such intense headwinds.

8:17Emily Jashinsky:Have you noticed, so he also has the companion bill to the House bill that bans stock trades from congressional members. The Ameritrade guy. Yeah, the Ameritrade guy, which is hilarious because he's the Ameritrade guy. But yeah, from the Nebraska Examiner here, they report his proposal would ban stock purchases by representatives and senators, spouses, and dependent children while the member is in office and requires 7 to 14 days notice before a stock sale. And it creates a financial penalty, quote, tied to any transaction that violates the law, fining the member$2 ,000 or 10 % of the stock transaction's value, whichever is greater, as well as any profit from the sale.

8:53Emily Jashinsky:It's not the strongest bill because I think it allows you to keep things in a blind trust, quote-unquote blind interest, which is not always the best arrangement. I mean, it's a bare minimum, but it looks like Dems are going to block that. It passed in the House, and it looks like Dems are going to block it today. It looks like it's their last day. It's going to be their last day in the Senate before the midterms in all likelihood, and they're probably going to block that along with Husted's data center bill, which both are weaker bills than they should be, but that's the nature of the Senate.

9:23Emily Jashinsky:And so it's interesting because you have these Republicans who are catching up and realizing that maybe being the ameritrade guy isn't great in a re-election year in an economy like this and it's not even like that what are you going to do like you there's nothing you can do if you're pete ricketts to shift away now on iran probably something he could do because he's not the like former general of the military or anything like that like he he probably could do a mike rogers on that try he could he could try he could try and so you see a willingness to try on one populist thing, but not on another thing.

9:57Emily Jashinsky:To me, that just says he probably loves the war. I don't know. That's my guess. My wild guess. He seems to actually like it. Meanwhile, there was a poll that really shook up Washington yesterday that came out. We put up D7. It's from the firm Angus Reid, which a couple of months ago, Republicans were pointing to the fact that Democrats were only favored in the generic ballot by two or three points. This poll has them favored by 16 points. Maybe it's an outlier. Maybe directionally, this is where the headwinds are blowing everything. 16 points is unprecedented. 16 points is Angie Nixon is a senator.

10:38Emily Jashinsky:Yeah. For life. Because also she's dope. So if she wins, she's winning re-election too. Senator for life. Or president. Mary of Florida. Or maybe she's president. Like, she can win Florida. um so uh if if they're catching this accurately now they're also finding that trump people who voted for trump in 2024 are telling pollsters that they did not which is a very common actually so i'm not just making fun of trump people here it's so it's fairly common that when when you vote for somebody and then they suck uh when you're asked about that a couple years later and you believe they suck significant numbers of people will say they did not really yeah There's also a winner thing.

11:20Like people will, it's less now in a polarized environment, but people, pollsters would have a real problem because people would say they voted for the winner. And they would have all these polls. Like this is impossible because the person won by two points, yet our polls all find that they won by seven. Because there's some people who just like to be with a winner and they don't like to be with a loser. You know who would do that?

11:44Emily Jashinsky:Donald Trump. Donald Trump absolutely would do that. But I didn't vote for myself. And so what that does is it might actually mess up the weighting of the polls a little bit and kind of overweight Trump support in a sense. Because you're looking for, you want to match people who voted for Harris and people who voted for Trump and get them in the right balance. But if people are lying to you and saying they voted for Harris, but they actually voted for Trump, you're going to wind up with a lot more Trump supporters in your poll. which actually should make the poll more favorable to Republicans.

12:17So there's an argument that in some ways these numbers are even undercounting how bad things are.

12:23Emily Jashinsky:Well, let's stick on this point. And in just one second, we can move to the econ block because there have been a ton of people who are openly identifying as Trump voters calling into, I say a ton, but a handful every day of people who are openly identifying as Trump voters calling into the SiriusXM show that I do. But before we go to that, I do just want to say, But RealCubePog6 has this cool tool where they have bar graphs for generic congressional ballot, as we were just looking at, their average of the congressional, the generic ballot in the last, since 2010, basically. And if you look at this day in 2010, 2014, 2022, and 2018, 2026, right now RCP has Dems at an 8.4 lead.

13:05Emily Jashinsky:So that's the highest for Democrats in modern history. Yeah. It is similar to where they were in 2018, but it's actually a point higher. So not insignificant at all when you're doing averages of the generic ballot. And on top of that, what it actually looks like is it's right around the same place. Republicans had about that same lead in 2010 when they took 63 seats, 63 seats. Nobody is prepared for Democrats to do that kind of damage. And if they do, right now that means they would be eating into the safe Republican seats. If you look at the Cook Political Report and you do that math, what that does, I mean, if you give them all the toss-ups, likelies, and leans and add in a couple safes, I think what they're probably looking at is a 15-vote margin overall.

13:51Emily Jashinsky:all but if you start saying that this is like 2010 territory because they have a similar generic ballot lead nobody's prepared for what the house looks like after that we have a lot of homework to do between now and election night because we don't want to be constantly being like wait who who just lost this we didn't even know this race was like on the map we don't want to look dumb in front of you guys we have a lot of respect for you guys you're doing the month three and then you're going to forget and start paying like so we're going to do our homework we're going We're going to try to find all the races that might surprise you.

14:26They shouldn't surprise us. We're the pros at this. We're still going to be surprised on election night by some Republicans who lose and some Democrats who win. Meanwhile, Trump.

14:35Emily Jashinsky:The only person who seems to be right now fighting that trend is Michelle Tafoya. It's very interesting in Minnesota. A very tight race in Minnesota. Now, again, what we're hearing behind closed doors is Republicans believe if you're in a close race, you're losing. Even if you're winning by a little bit, you're losing. So it would be very surprising if Michelle Tafoya won that, but she's not been bear hugging Trump by any means whatsoever. And so Susan Collins, Michelle Tafoya, it looks like Susan Collins is if the waiting in the last recent polling in her races with the Sarah Gideon one in particular is any example.

15:08Emily Jashinsky:She might be doing OK, but if it's the opposite and that we're totally missing the picture, that's not the story. We have news on that front. Bernie Sanders has a pretty significant fund of cash and he's dipping into it to back Peggy Flanagan in Minnesota, Keith Ellison also in Minnesota and Angie Nixon in Florida. We'll see how substantially he spends. But it is interesting that that he feels it is important to spend for Flanagan and also also Ellison. Meanwhile, Trump is using your money to run a bunch more ads and put up D8. Axios is reporting that Trump's use of taxpayer-funded advertising, completely illegal.

15:54Like you cannot run campaign ads with taxpayer money. It's completely insane. It's about to ramp up. Now, my guess is that these ads make people are a net negative for Trump. Like I feel like apparently Trump is handpicking these. I feel like Trump has lost his touch. I feel like people are so mad when they see that paid for by the U.S. government followed following just obvious Trump propaganda slop. Feel like it's going to make and they're going to hear about it, too. We're going to talk about it on the news. Other people are going to talk about it on their programs. So they're going to know that while you're suffering, Trump is spending your money to run propaganda ads on his behalf.

16:44And that's going to make people even angrier.

16:48Emily Jashinsky:And the propaganda ads about how he's fixing the economy. He's not getting it. He's what, stamping out the warmongers? Like, it's insane, baby. He's going to drive the warmongers out of Washington, which is absolutely incredible. Last thing, you know, Todd Achilles, I think he's coming on the program next week, maybe, producer Griffin said. He's the independent candidate running in Idaho against Jim Risch. Now, Julian, drop sites, Julian Andrione caught up with Jim Risch in the Senate asking him, well, actually, let's roll this interesting kind of back and forth between the incumbent Idaho senator, who was former governor.

17:30He's been in Idaho people's lives, basically their entire lives. And his job is now on the line. There is no such thing as an independent. Go ahead. Okay. Independent meaning we don't take any of the conglomerate money or have corporate advertisers. So you don't get paid very well then, I guess. Julian Adriani with DropSite News. With who? DropSite News. What? Who is that? You don't know DropSite News? It's a new independent media organization started two years ago. 50 ,000 individual donors. That's how we make it. Small dollar donations. We'll have to get a couple from each one. I wanted to ask you about mortgage rates with relation to the war.

18:05The mortgage rates are up to 7%. You think I want to do this walking down the hallway? I don't do this. You don't do hallway interviews? No. No. No, not especially on a subject like that. We've done in hallway interviews before. Not for me. Oh, yeah, with you. What was the issue? Oh, it must have been months and months ago that I caught you right around that elevator. But let me ask you really quickly about Iran. I mean, the Trump administration and a number of the different key congressional allies have basically been signaling that this was a preemptive attack before Iran could hit Israel. And I'm wondering whether you're comfortable with that.

18:43Not only am I comfortable with it, I know the intelligence behind it, and I agree 100%. It must have been a memorable event. Anyway, I'm not going to... You want to talk about the mortgage rates that's 7 % since the war? Not here, not now. Okay. Well, the League of Conservation Voters has scheduled two debates coming up. I believe, actually, one is supposed to be tonight, and then another in early October. Rish has not agreed yet, as far as I know, to participate in either of them.

19:10Emily Jashinsky:Great questions from Julian. Great questions from Julian. As usual. Let's talk about the economy. Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin unfiltered podcast. Here's what you missed. And the argument is, do you want to win? If you don't win, you have no power. It's real. Those are the very people who I always say vote against their own economic interest. And they complain about the very thing to receive. It's raw. I knew that the issue of transgender athletes was not going well with a lot of black men. Roland Martin Unfiltered. I went off. I said, this is exactly what I'm talking about. Y 'all gonna scream at Chanel, but you don't want to see a black luxury company in the same vein.

19:57Catch Roland Martin's daily commentary on the Black Information Network. 12 seats. Those are moving south. So if you Democrats, you don't wait to 2030. You better be hitting the ground going hard in the south now. And download Roland Martin Unfiltered on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

20:19Emily Jashinsky:Some news on the economic front. This is from yesterday. The CoBC letter said, Breaking the U.S. 30-year note yield rises above 5.6 % for the first time since June 2002. That's another plus 36 basis points this month alone. 8 % mortgages will arrive next week. And actually, let's put the next tariff sheet up on the screen as well. This is from the Wall Street Journal. A new report found, U.S. consumer confidence fell in September amid elevated oil prices, inflation worries, according to the conference board. That survey was released yesterday. The research group, according to the journal, said its consumer confidence index fell by 6.7 points to 81.9 percent in September from 88.6 in August.