Is a Blue Wave Really Coming?

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1:07Stop. This is SimpliSafe. Police are on the way. Using AI alerts, U.S.-based live agents help deter break-ins. SimpliSafe, no long-term contracts. Save 60 % on a new system with professional monitoring during our 20th anniversary sale at simplisafe.com slash Spotify. Outdoor deterrence requires a SimpliSafe Active Guard outdoor protection plan starting at$49.99 a month. Visit simplisafe.com slash licenses for alarm license information. Tennessee 2012. So I actually don't know your guys' story of where you were on 9-11. I remember there was a certain power to that because it happened so long ago that something like a third of the country wasn't even alive at that time.

1:49Jane, where were you on 9-11? Well, believe it or not, I was at the gym about getting ready to go to work. And I watched the first plane fly into the building. And the second one, because, you know, it was a TV screen, I said, that's it. This is terrorism. And went back to the office and I worked all day. And the most important thing, well, two important things happened. One, my daughter was the only kid left in school because I was working all day. So she may never forgive me. And the other thing that happened was that that night, the most important thing for me anyway was I ended up at the cathedral, Washington's Episcopal Cathedral, where there was the most unbelievable impromptu gathering.

2:39Wow. And the priest said, this is a test of us, not just of them. And the most important thing he said was not to lose our humanity as we faced an enemy who had shown us no humanity. And from that point on, I began to think of the war on terror as a test of our values, not just their values. Wow. That's prescient, Jane, I have to tell you. I mean, I was living in New York on 9-11 in 2001, but on that day, I happened to be on my way to West Virginia for some reporting. I was on my way to the airport, and the time it took me to get to the airport, I was flying from Washington, D.C., was basically the time between the two planes hitting.

3:25And by the time I got there, the airport was shut down. I ended up covering the Pentagon that day, which was in flames. and then went back to New York. And to be honest, guys, it was like, it feels like it was the beginning of my entire adult life. You know, I'm turning 50, it was half my life. And it's been shaped by, as you put it, Jane, sort of by the moral shadow cast by that moment. And I ended up writing a book about how much it changed us as a country. I was in Moscow, actually, which was a very disconcerting place to be on September 11th. And I was in the Russian defense ministry. We got in the motorcade with them.

4:08And that's when the first plane hit. We're on the way to a press conference. By the time we got to the press conference, the second plane had hit. The Pentagon official goes in, gamely starts the press conference anyways. A reporter, Patrick Tyler from the New York Times, stands up and he says, Sir, why are you here talking about missile defense when this is obviously a terrible act of terrorism that has occurred and your missile defense would do nothing to stop it. And, you know, this is literally minutes into this kind of incredible, horrible global event. And while he's stuttering and trying to figure out how to answer, that was when the plane hit the Pentagon.

4:52And, you know, it was just, it was this moment that I think was this kind of collective end of innocence. You know, for 10 years after the end of the Cold War, we just, we were a superpower unchallenged by anything. We didn't believe that planes could come out of the sky and affect Americans where we lived. And it just, it was an inconceivable event that sort of changed everything for how Americans looked at the world.

5:26Welcome to The Political Scene from The New Yorker, a weekly discussion about the big questions in American politics. I'm Susan Glasser, and I'm joined by my colleagues Evan Osnos and Jane Mayer. Hey, Evan. Hey, guys. Great to be with you. Hey, Jane. So good to be with you. Great to see you both.

5:49So we're going to talk this week about America's polarized election. We're less than two months out from election day. I want to start with a few numbers that relate to the midterm elections. 58. That's Donald Trump's average disapproval rating as of today, Thursday, September 10th. 41. That's the number of seats that Republicans lost in the House in 2018, the last Trump midterm election. 105. That's the amount that a barrel of Brent crude oil costs today. And believe me, it's a lot more than it was just a few months ago. And the final two numbers I thought we should start with today. Three and four.

6:38Three seats is the number of seats that Democrats need to pick up in the House this fall. Four seats is the number that Democrats need to pick up in the Senate if they are to win back that chamber. We will discuss all of that and more with our guest this week, Amy Walter, editor of the Cook Political Report, commentator on PBS NewsHour, And I think really America's best nonpartisan, dispassionate election observer. But, you know, I want to start first by asking you, Evan and Jane, what are our baseline assumptions going into these midterms, right? Like it seems like three seats in the House, there's almost no one in Washington who doesn't think that the Democrats are almost a lock to win back the House.

7:25And yet I know we're all intuitively, instinctively wary of the conventional wisdom about a blue wave. How are you guys feeling heading into this fall campaign season? You know, I am out on the road right now where I'm doing some reporting. I was in West Virginia yesterday. And the thing that kept going through my mind, of course, was how much does the Trump effect still hold? I mean, West Virginia is a place that has had more or less pretty thorough support for him. There are pockets of people who don't support him. And so I kept running into people and hearing these little indicators of the way the Trump world or call it the Trump effect was grading on them.

8:09I mean, I was with a retired coal miner who said, you know, nobody's buying American coal right now because of the trade war. He didn't go further than that. But then I was at the home of a retired social worker, and this is the small example of how it ripples through people's lives, that getting the grass cut by the kid who lives next door is now more expensive because the gas is expensive. So they're not cutting the grass as often because they don't want to pay$5 gas. And yet on the bookshelf, I saw there a mug that said, hell yeah, I voted for Trump and I'll do it again in 2024. And, you know, I just thought to myself, which of those two instincts is going to prevail for many Americans this fall?

8:53Well, I'm seeing the opposite end of America. I'm in New York City and talking to people here who are expecting a huge blue wave. And I'm thinking, you know, superstitiously, don't count on it. You never know, really. I mean, all kinds of things can happen. Our polls have been so kaflooey this year, and there are a million reasons why the fundamentals look like they would support a blue wave, but you never know. So people are certainly counting on it here, though. Susan, what about you? What's kind of on top of mind for you? Yeah, I mean, look, I think you see this incredible anxiety and distrust that we're talking about just now baked into the system.

9:37I've known our guest Amy for a long time, since before 9-11, actually. And it used to be that there were like 100 competitive house races. Now there's only a handful, according to her ratings and others. And so the structural shifts, the question we have, right, is like, is that thing that's staring us in the face that seems glaring and obvious, Jane, the blue wave, is there some structural shift? Is there some outrage that Donald Trump is going to perform on this that is going to undo what seems an almost inevitable result? In 2018, Democrats won 41 seats in the House. It's hard to see how even though Trump is way more unpopular, he can do that this year when there's only 18 competitive races.

10:27So I'm looking forward to sort of hashing it through with Amy, and I'm really glad we're starting off the campaign season with what, you know, I thought was a great episode to just kind of level set our expectations, what's realistic, what should we be paying attention to to try to assess. Well, now let's bring on Amy Walter of The Cook Political Report.

10:52Amy, the Cook Political Report is our lifeline to some kind of objective assessment in these definitely unobjective times. You know, we need not just numbers from you. We need a picture and a story to help us understand. Like, you know, are we crazy to think that history and the numbers suggest the blue wave is baked in here? How are you approaching these midterms?

11:19Amy Walter:Yeah, it is sort of the essential and existential question, Susan, because we live in a time, especially over the last 10 or 12 years, where our politics is basically a red and a blue America that are essentially the same size. And the difference between one side being in power and the other side being in power is literally just a shifting of a handful of districts or states in every one of these elections. And it's these same sort of purplish states that move and districts that move a little bit one way and a little bit the other way. And so while there have been wave elections, we're kind of just moving the same types of seats and states from one party to the next.

12:06Amy Walter:versus a wave election where one side actually gets deep into the other side's territory, right? And that's where, if you look at the numbers where we sit today, in another era where we were not as polarized, where voters were more willing to vote, say, for the candidate rather than just keep their blue or red jersey on, And these numbers that you read off would be absolutely devastating for the party in power. And yet the structural realities of our political system are what is keeping this and people like us from saying, oh, well, yeah, right. Like Democrats are absolutely going to sweep the Senate and they're going to win 40 seats in the House because it is still very hard for those structural barriers to completely disintegrate.

13:03Amy Walter:And so that's where we are. What are the structural barriers you're thinking of? That's very interesting. Walk us through. Yeah. Maybe I'll put it into two camps. There are two structural realities. The one is the ways in which the districts, so let's look at the House side, the districts have both been gerrymandered, which we all know about that, including this recent round of gerrymandering in the mid-cycle. And then the other reality that just so few folks sitting in these districts are switching between one side or the other from one election to the next. And back in, say, 2010, there were 61 seats Democrats were defending that Obama had either lost or had carried by less than five points.

13:54Amy Walter:This year, there are 14 of those. So even if you say, well, this is a terrible night for Republicans, their exposure is much less than it was for Democrats at that time in 2010, or even where Republicans were in 2018 when they had 37 of those seats. So that's structural on the House side. On the Senate side, if the battle for control of the Senate were going through those seven key states that we talk about all the time on the presidential level, the blue wall states in the upper Midwest, the Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and Michigan, if it was Arizona and Nevada and Georgia, and then, of course, North Carolina, If those were the only seven states in play and Democrats just had to win those seven states to win control of the Senate, you could feel much more confident saying, well, that's likely to happen.

14:54Amy Walter:But we know that in order for Democrats to net the number of seats they need to be just a bare majority, they need to knock off two states that Trump carried by double digits. And even if you go back to 2006, the last time Democrats knocked off both the House and the Senate, and they did that by winning five states that Bush had carried in the previous election. Bush had carried all those states but won by single digits. So it just keeps coming back to just how much redder and bluer these states are than they were even 20 years ago. So, Amy, does this mean that basically the whole thing rests on the same small group of sort of purpley voters that everything turns on each election?

15:51or is it possible that the difference might be turnout where just the enthusiasm difference, rather than the same people changing their mind, going back and forth, it might in fact be a bunch of people who didn't bother to vote before or this year have decided not to.

16:12Amy Walter:I think this is a really important point. So every election is a new electorate. You know, there's that ancient saying of, you know, a man can't cross the same river twice. An electorate is never the same river twice, right? It is always changing and it's always different. So when I say people aren't as willing to switch their votes, I don't mean exactly that there's like, you know, in the old days there was that one person who every election would go like, I'm going to be a Democrat, I'm going to be a Republican. It was more that the idea was that events had, I think events had a more salient impact on people's choice in how they were voting, right?

16:51Amy Walter:That there were still deep blue and deep red areas, but that, let's just think about the last Trump administration, the fact that he went through, we had impeachments, we had COVID, we had Charlottesville, we had all the things, and his approval ratings, there was always that floor there, right? That no matter what was happening, you still did not see a dissolution of his floor. What's different about this time, Jane, is that you are seeing his floor lower for the first time. So instead of coming into this election at 42%, 45%, you know, right now he's sitting at 38%. That means that he's losing some of those people that had been kind of with him all along in the first administration.

17:41Amy Walter:And the question I think that we're all asking is, well, where do those people go? And that's your question, too. Do they show up and vote for a Democrat? Do they stay home? And right now, what we're seeing is a lot of Republicans are not interested in showing up at all, which is obviously a big problem for Republicans. But the deeper red the state, the more that Democrats need to have not just Republicans staying home, but they also have to get some of those Trump voters to show up and vote for them, vote for a Democrat. So let's talk about the Trump factor. I mean, you know, this week, Donald Trump has thrown this unusual midterm convention in Dallas.

18:29And of course, it is. It's all about Trump. I'm not on the ticket. You got to pretend I'm not on the ticket. You got to do me a big, the biggest favor you've ever done me. You've got to do this for me. You've got to pretend I'm on the ticket. I'm on the ticket. I'm on the ticket. He's on the ticket. Pretend I'm on the ticket. He's the keynote speaker on the first night. He's the keynote speaker on the second night. He's going to talk for many, many hours. He's going to have his name plastered all over everything. There's a lot of Democrats who are delighted at the idea that Donald Trump would like to make this election a referendum on Donald Trump.

19:05But there are also some Republicans who see this as actually their only hope, and that is to motivate voters as if Trump were on the ballot, although we know history suggests that's hard to do. What's your take about the Trump factor when it comes to Jane's question here of who's actually going to show up?

19:23Amy Walter:Yeah, so the Republicans who are the least likely to show up right now, the ones who say in polls they're not as enthusiastic, are not the MAGA Republicans. So, so many pollsters have started to ask this question, which I'm really glad they have. They ask voters, not just, are you Democrat or Republican, but like, how do you identify? Do you identify as progressive? Do you identify as MAGA? Do you identify as a traditional party person? Basically what they're trying to figure out is, all right, are you a Trump voter because you're just all in on Trump or are you a Trump voter because you're basically a conservative and you identify with the Republican Party.

20:01Amy Walter:And what you see in the polling out there is that folks who identify as MAGA say, I'm really excited to go vote. They're still big thumbs up on Donald Trump. And they're not as pessimistic about the economy or Trump's handling of it, as are those Republicans who don't identify as MAGA. Those are the folks that are like, I don't know if I'm gonna show up to vote. Those are the ones who are saying, I think the economy's actually not doing well. and they don't think Trump's doing a good job on the economy. And so to me, those are the voters that become the most important, sort of to Jane's question, because you need those regular Republicans to show up, the ones who they just really wouldn't vote for a Democrat given a choice on it.

20:47Amy Walter:So when Trump says, well, when I'm not on the ballot, he's not wrong. It is true. Turnout drops when he's not on the ballot. he does bring new people to the polls. But a presidential election is so different. And where I think Trump does so well in presidential and getting new people out is because he's able to make the race uniquely a choice between himself and then this other one person that he can caricature, you know, crooked Hillary and doddering Joe and crazy Kamala, For voters, they are able to really cleanly see, all right, so my choice is Donald Trump and then this other person. This election is really truly what he's saying is, I want you to vote on whether you think I'm doing an awesome job.

21:42You've given us a very good sense of the way that Trump is putting himself at the center of the Republican picture. Now let's put this over onto the Democratic side and understand something about the Democrats. Because one of the surprises has been, given how intense feelings are about Trump, one might have imagined that Democrats who were the sort of heroes of the resistance, those kinds of candidates, people who had defined themselves explicitly for their efforts in opposition to Trump, they actually have not done as well as one might have expected. and instead you've seen the success of other candidates, some of whom are aligned with Democratic socialists, not all.

22:27How do you make sense of that fact, that Trump is both, on the one hand, immensely powerful as a piece of dark matter in this, but evidently not completely?

22:38Amy Walter:Right. He still is the straw that stirs the drink, right? Like, I mean, everything does revolve around him. And I think where the Democratic base is right now, some of it is a frustration with the fecklessness they see of Democratic leadership. But the other piece is, I think you also have a percent of the base that want to get beyond this being just about Donald Trump. And look, if you watch the campaign ads, not just in primaries, but watch campaign ads now that are starting in the general election, what you're hearing really is, a message that is basically that the challenge that we have in our politics goes beyond Donald Trump.

23:22Amy Walter:It is more systemic. It is corporate greed. It is a status quo political system of elites who are taking lobbyists' dollars. So there's this piece of the Democratic Party, much like we saw during the Tea Party era on the Republican side, that wants to purge the party of the old guard, And it is an old guard that they feel like has become too, Washington has become too attached to a way of doing business that has hollowed out the middle class. So the corruption issue is playing not just as corruption against Trump's corruption, but against the whole corruption of money and politics and the kind of takeover of politics by the oligarchs or the billionaires or whatever you want to call this sort of insider powerful group.

24:20Is that what you're seeing out there?

24:21Amy Walter:Yeah, 100 percent. And it's the connection between corruption. Look, Republicans are using it, too. It's a smart strategy, right? They can't go out and say everything is terrible in the economy because of Joe Biden. People don't, they don't buy that. Well, they are saying that to be clear. To be, some of them are. Yes, for sure. But not in their advertising. And so this is always the fascinating thing about Donald Trump that while he is the centerpiece of this campaign and he is what is going to help turn out Democrats, what you will see in messaging really is one that is about the system being problematic more than it just being, this is Donald Trump's fault.

25:10Amy Walter:This is why you got to vote for Democrats or vote against this Republican. So we're going to take a quick break. And when we come back, Amy, let's get a little bit nitty gritty. Are Democrats actually going to take back the Senate or the House? More with Amy Walter. The political scene from The New Yorker will be right back.

25:40If you've been enjoying the show, please leave us a rating or review on the podcast platform of your choice. And while you're there, don't forget to hit the follow button so you never miss an episode. Thank you so much for listening. This episode is brought to you by Palmolive. Family time isn't just the big moments. It's weeknight dinners, sitting around the table, everyone talking all at once. So when the plates are empty and the sink is full, use Palmolive Ultra. Palmolive's most powerful formula removes up to 99.9 % of grease, leaving your dishes sparkling clean. And the new convenient pump makes cleaning even easier, so you can spend less time tackling dishes and more time together.

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