The Washington Roundtable Answers Your Questions

0:00I'm curious if you guys think Elon Musk is worth a trillion dollar pay package. What do you think? I don't think anybody's worth a trillion dollar pay package. Can I say it might be worth quite a bit to the other party as a target? Does it come with, you know, automatic sending him to Mars at the end of it? Well, in a funny way, one way to interpret this is that this is essentially the shareholders paying him to stay out of politics. Because the theory here is the only way he makes these benchmarks is if he doesn't continue to tank the image of everything he's associated with commercially. So in a subtle way, they're basically saying we will pay you a trillion dollars to close your mouth.

0:46I'd take that deal.

0:52Welcome 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 today as ever by my colleagues, Evan Osnos and Jane Mayer. Hey there, Evan. Hey there, Susan. Hi, Jane. Hey, Susan. Hey, Evan. Well, what an eventful few weeks it's been. We are now officially in the longest government shutdown in U.S. history. The first elections of Trump's second term have gone Democratic in a big way. And somehow, the midterm elections are now only a year away. To gear up for this endless and high-stakes election season, we thought we'd try something a little bit different today.

1:35So we asked you to send in questions about the 2026 midterms. And thank you. So many of you did. Today, we'll hear and read your questions, do our best to answer them, and try to make sense of it all together. We do this show every week, and we know you listen, but it's just so exciting to hear from you all as well, so thank you. Now, before we jump right into the listener questions, of course, let's unpack a little bit the news of the week. There's a lot of it. Evan and Jane, earlier this week, we saw really resounding wins for Democrats across several states. And while it was expected the Democrats would win, I think the scale and scope of the margin was not on anybody's dance card.

2:18So do you buy into the, let's just call it, wave of little bit of giddiness we're hearing this week? You know, it's a long road to the midterms. What are you thinking? Is this the week, as I put in my column, that America really started clapping back at Donald Trump? Or is it just another war of protest from a part of America, blue America, that already hates Donald Trump? You know what? I was seeing analysts saying if there was more than a 10-point margin in some of these races, it was going to send a gigantic message. And I really think it did. I think what it showed was that Trump is vulnerable.

2:58He seemed before this all-powerful. Now people are beginning to say, oh, he might not be that popular. They may have to break with him in some ways. And he's lost some of his voters from the last time around. So I think it sent a big message. What do you think, Evan? Yeah, I think that the dominant message is here, people don't like this. They don't like this. They don't like the meanness, frankly. I think some of that is just wearing against the story people tell themselves about this country. the brutality that we see on television and in clips of ICE raids. I think there's the telling data, as you suggested a moment ago, is if you really look in places where Trump has been successful in the past and you look at places like some of these rural areas in Virginia that in theory are supposed to be Trumpy and they were going for Democrats much more squarely.

3:53And I think there's a - Or not coming out. I mean, low propensity voters that he pulled in last time were not there this time. So, I mean, you can over-interpret it, but it shows there's a path. Susan, what do you think? Well, I think there's the big issue that probably shaped this more than anything, which is the economy. And Donald Trump said on day one, prices were magically going to go down. He said a lot of things were going to magically happen, like the end of the Ukraine war on day one. But this one is one that, you know, Americans, whoever they are, blue America, red America, rural, urban, this is one they care about every time they go to the store.

4:29And Not only did he not succeed in doing that, but in fact, as anyone who has gone to the grocery store can tell you, prices have gone up and up. It really struck, too, that, you know, there's almost this reversal, right? Donald Trump was the one last year hammering away at the Biden administration's record on this, saying inflation was literally the worst inflation in the history of the world. He actually repeats that phrase that, you know, when I came in, it was the worst inflation ever in American history. You know what the inflation was a year ago and what it is now? It's basically exactly the same.

5:03And so now it's Donald Trump is the one who's in denial about this, you know, affordability crisis that we have in the country. And I think it was that that unifies, you know, for all this talk about Democrats being divided, what unified candidates, whether it was New York City's new mayor on the left or Mikey Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger in the center left, they were all talking about this. They were all talking about the things that voters actually care about. And I think that's the template, you know, that might matter in 2026. It was interesting. I was reading, you know, people were surprised that there's such a gender gap.

5:42I think a lot of women do the shopping, I have to say. I do a lot of the grocery shopping. You're in shock if you're shopping. And then, of course, there's the tariffs, which are roiling the economy. And so we're looking at the possibility of some kind of return of stagflation, which was really, you know, a combination of high unemployment and inflation at the same time. It's a killer. Well, I mentioned earlier some of these rural voters, you know, they are getting slammed because not only are they paying more, but then also trade policies are wreaking havoc on the underlying economy for farmers.

6:16And then I think there's another piece. Look, I've been, you know, droning on this year about economic inequality. But this is a prime demonstration of it because, frankly, for people at the top of our economic ladder, stock market's roaring. It's a pretty good time to be wealthy in America. But there's this big hidden block of suffering. There's a lot of layoffs going on. There was a report out this week that there have been as many layoffs in 2025 as there were around 2008, 2009. So, you know, there is a tremendous amount of churn going on. And it's not described partly in the numbers because, let's remember, the government is shut down right now and they're not even measuring the full depth of economic statistics.

6:57You know, something that I think is interesting about this, I'm curious what you guys think is, you think of Trump, if nothing else, as a good marketer. He's like a salesman and has some instinct about how to connect with people on selling himself. He seems so tone deaf and clueless to have had this Mar-a-Lago, Great Gatsby-themed party over Halloween while the snap benefits were being cut off, to be bulldozing the East Room to create a ballroom for fat cats that's going to be, you know, completely disproportional to the size of the White House. Don't forget the marble bathroom. I don't see a lot of marble bathroom voters out there.

7:37I mean, so, I mean, is he... The answer is he didn't care about these elections, Jane. I think that you're right that Donald Trump is a great marketer. But his definition of politics is about himself. and he didn't even campaign for these folks. He didn't even endorse the gubernatorial candidate in Virginia because he anticipated correctly that she was going to lose. So part of it, right, is that he expected that they were going to lose both governorships in Virginia and New Jersey. And he sort of discounted it. But I also think this is a man who is on a power trip. He is a man who fears no political consequence.

8:14That is literally the only explanation for the great Gatsby-themed Halloween party. And here's a couple other data points that go to your point. In New Jersey, literally anyone who gave the whiff of concern about the election would not have barely one month before the election cut off billions of dollars in funding for the crucial building of a new tunnel under the Hudson River to take New Jersey commuters into New York City. This is like the most important issue for voters in northern New Jersey. And what did the Trump administration do? Literally cut off billions of dollars to punish New Jersey barely a month before the election.

8:53In Virginia, it was like Donald Trump wanted the Republicans to lose because how else can you explain how he's gone after the Virginia workforce, which is federal workers all year long? He's treated them to a series of traumas, as we've discussed repeatedly on this podcast. And so in the middle of a government shutdown, again, it was like Republicans were trying very hard to lose and not just lose a little bit, but lose badly in New Jersey and Virginia. Well, I mean, we'll get into this, but I get the sense that there's a dawning recognition that the stakes for these midterms could very well be personal, not just for Trump, but for everyone around him.

9:35Because if you listen to what Steve Bannon was just saying, he was just giving a speech where he said, if we lose, if we lose the House, if we lose the Senate, if we lose Congress, he said, some of us are going to go to jail. And I include myself in that, he said. They see investigations coming if they lose Congress. So they may not be so invulnerable. Yeah. Well, let's begin to hear not just from Steve Bannon, but from our listeners. and that is what we're going to do today. And I think it's really great. I love hearing your voices in particular. Got a lot of smart email questions as well. We're going to take turns sharing those with the group.

10:16So who wants to jump in? We've divvied up these questions. Who wants to start? You know, I'll kick things off here. The first listener question comes to us in a voicemail, and it's a theme that was raised by a lot of people, and that's the safety and security of elections. Let's listen. Hi, Nicole from Santa Rosa. It feels like holding on to the House majority in 2026 is key to Trump's whole agenda. So what are the actual chances of having a free and fair midterm election? What do you guys make of this, Jane? Well, first I would say when you ask about election integrity, we have election integrity.

10:51So I would say to start with that, that we actually have free and fair elections in this country. And so you'd have to change things in order to slant it towards the people in power. I do not have 100 percent confidence that we won't see a lot of tampering in important key races. I think it's entirely possible we will see troops monitoring elections that are intimidating to voters. We might even potentially see martial law. It sounds kind of ridiculous, but I think it's possible. You could also potentially see the FBI sees voter machines, and that would not give me a lot of confidence given who's running the FBI.

11:37I mean, there are definite potential serious concerns, but we do have a system that has worked thus far. So I'd like to put to bed the idea that we don't have election integrity in this country. We do. It can be tampered with if something goes wrong, and I see on the horizon that possibility. But Susan, what are you looking out for on that score? Yeah, I mean, look, Donald Trump has always been the guy who, if he can't win something fair and square, wants to change the rules. And what we're already hearing from him in anticipation of the next round of elections is, you know, all caps, social media demands to change the rules of our elections, right?

12:17Just this week, in response to Democrat sweeps in these off-year elections, what was Donald Trump saying in his all caps social media post, he's saying, change the rules, change the rules in the Senate, get rid of the filibuster, and then impose upon Democrats a new infrastructure for how we govern elections in the country, among other things. For example, one of the things Republicans want that Democrats have fought for years is a federal voter ID law. Now, that's not going to happen anytime soon. In fact, it's very unlikely that the Senate Republicans are going to go along with Trump's demand to get rid of the filibuster.

12:51That's what the Senate Majority Leader John Thuna said, but I think it tells you the direction of travel. Anything that Donald Trump can do, and then some things that we think he can't do, but he was going to do anyways, he's going to do to change the rules because that's who he is. He's the classic guy who fights with the umps. I think that's a great point. I just wanted to say one addendum on this issue of the federal ID laws, which is I actually spoke at some point with Cleta Mitchell, who is one of the lawyers to Trump in the past. She is on the right and really claiming voter fraud and all of this sort of thing.

13:27And I said to her, okay, so you want a voter ID law. How do you feel about just issuing voter IDs to everybody in America then when they turn, you know, voting age? And she said, oh, no, no, no, we don't want that. They actually don't really want national voting is what they really don't want is the full franchise. They want IDs that keep their voters able to vote and stop other people. It's a form of voter suppression. And that idea of maybe voter intimidation too is one of the things to watch for. I mean, the idea that if you're acculturating people to the image of having troops in the streets, to having the National Guard called out, to having guys in uniform wandering around, it makes it a little bit easier if you then in the run up to the election say, all right, we're going to have them monitoring polling places or keeping an eye on things to prevent fraud.

14:21These are the little steps that are about getting people used to the idea of federal interference. Now, I will say one thing, which is elections are administered on the local level. It could be very different in very different places. But it is it's a real concern to be worried about. I think Trump is very worried about a third impeachment. I think he is concerned about all the things you mentioned earlier, Jane, about what could result of investigations if the House is in the hands of Democrats. So he has reasons to raise, and particularly after the experience of the last week, where it was pretty clear that they didn't do well.

14:59Jane, you've got a listener question. Okay. Well, this is an email from a listener, PG. They write, Right. With the states now heavily gerrymandered, is there even a slim chance for Democrats to take control of the House? What do you guys think, Susan? Yeah, absolutely. There's two things happening here. One, which is this crazy race to redistrict in the middle of a cycle that's never happened before. It's an extremely worrisome development, I think, from the perspective of kind of a gerrymandering arms race. Right. So, you know, it starts with Donald Trump pressuring Texas. Then California says, no way, we're not going to let that stand.

15:42They passed this week this referendum that allows them to redistrict as well. You have a number of other Republican states that have gone ahead with redistricting to try to maximize the number of seats they might get. So from the point of view of the polarization of our country, very bad news. But I think we don't really fully understand yet where it's going to be. Certainly, California and Texas balance each other out. They both appear to be giving their majority party the possibility of five new congressional seats. So that, in a way, is a wash between these two big states. I don't know exactly where the districts are going to land in the other states, but Democrats were very, very close in the House.

16:20They're, you know, five seats are under at the start of this Congress. That's a very narrow and even ungovernable majority for the Republicans. So Democrats started out with a very strong chance, given the headwinds that any incumbent party faces in a midterm election, winning back the House. And I think this week's results show pretty clearly that when you have a big wave going, right, if you have, you know, a strong direction, that's going to roll over a lot of these, you know, kind of structural impediments that there might be. The other thing that I noticed this week that I think is a classic example of sort of like, be careful what assumptions you make about things.

17:02Republicans, you know, they were a little high on their own supply after winning the 2024 election. And in Texas, I think they got this idea that because there was a swing of Latino voters in border districts from Democrats to voting for Donald Trump in 2024, that somehow they could count on those voters forever. And that is one of the premises behind the Texas redistricting. It's not clear that that's going to work out. Those districts could backfire on Republicans and they might not win all of them. But I don't know. What do you think, Evan? Yeah, I agree with everything you said. I would also just remind Democrats it's, you know, Democrats love to immediately gravitate to the worst case scenario.

17:40I do think it's worth reminding ourselves that in the midterm elections, it tends to be that the party out of power performs well, especially in a case like this, where you have a very unpopular president. You have the Republican Party in control of essentially all the branches of government. So there is a strong incentive on the part of Democrats to get out there. But that is the key question. Will they, in fact, get out there? But just let's remind ourselves of what history is here, which is that the party in the White House tends to lose double digit seats, you know, something like 25, 26 seats if you go back to World War II.

18:16So Democrats have a tremendous opportunity here. And that's something to put in the foreground so that people don't feel as if there is no chance at all. Well, just to rain on your parade a little bit. I was waiting for that. If you listen to, say, Dave Daly, who's got a very good book called Anti-Democratic Out, he predicts that no matter how much redistricting goes on, that the Republicans are going to have the advantage in terms of redistricting because they have more districts that they can gerrymander to their advantage. But again, turnout will be the story. Yeah. All right. Well, we're going to take a quick break.

18:50And when we come back, we'll turn to the future of the Democratic Party and how they might win back those independents who went for Donald Trump last time. The political scene from The New Yorker will be back in just a moment.

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20:11okay so evan we're going to turn to a few questions we got about the future of the democratic party yeah and i'd like to start us off with a couple of related emails uh listener carolyn wrote in about james tallarico who is a u.s senate candidate in texas who's not only winning praise from Barack Obama, but is really all the buzz among Democrats these days. She wrote, Tallarico is a former teacher and Presbyterian seminarian. He talks about Trump era corruption in moral and spiritual terms. Is he at all on your radar? He is very much so. And I think not necessarily because there's anything like a surefire win for a Democrat in Texas.

20:54It's been several decades since they had a Democrat in the Senate. But it is exciting to see the way that he's talking. And, you know, as this listener suggested, you know, here is somebody who's a Presbyterian seminarian. So he talks about God in ways that are multilayered, complex, credible. He talks about it in ways that make sense in Texas, but he's coming at it from a democratic perspective. There was an amazing moment that circulated back in 2023, I think, when he was talking about a gun bill in Texas. There had been mass shootings. And he zeroed in on that key phrase that we hear so often, that after there's been a terrible shooting, Republicans will call for thoughts and prayers.

21:38You can't offer thoughts and prayers on Monday and then debate a bill to loosen gun regulations on Tuesday. I believe in the power of prayer. I believe prayer can change lives. I believe prayer can change the world. But there is something profoundly cynical about asking God to solve a problem that we're not willing to solve ourselves. He said, God moves, God works through us. And it was an immensely powerful thing. I think we can, you know, we'll go through all the ways in which it's very hard for Democrats in a place like Texas. But he went on Joe Rogan, sat there for two hours, handled himself very well.

22:24And at the end of it, Joe Rogan said, you should run for president. So I think that we're talking in this episode a little bit about generational change. And a guy like him, who has a very long road between now and Election Day, is somebody who is introducing a new spirit into the election that's worth watching. Well, speaking of Senate candidates, Evan, we did get another question in our sort of Senate lightning round here about Sherrod Brown, not a new generation Democrat, but a Democrat who lost his seat but is now trying a comeback in Ohio. A lot of people think he has a really good chance to do that.

23:01He was seen as one of the Democrats who had the ability to still run and win on heavily red states in Ohio. It used to be a swing state when Sherrod Brown was first elected. Not anymore. A very red area of the country now. What do you think about his prospects this time around? And what does it tell us about national? Yeah. I mean, I'll be curious what you guys think of it. Look, I think he has a tough road because he is running against a Republican senator who was appointed by a Republican governor to fill the vacancy left by J.D. Vance. Sherrod Brown is popular in the state. He didn't lose by all that much.

23:40He lost by something like three percentage points. But the track record on this is hard. It's a challenging thing to do. And one of the other things here is that there is going to be an effort to keep him out. He's been very vocal against cryptocurrency. He's not a big fan. And so I would expect to see a lot of dark money, as Jane would know, that may be pouring in from the crypto industry. But it's worth remembering he was in some ways reminding me of Tallarico a moment ago. Sherrod Brown is a Democrat who was talking about less about left versus right politics than about top versus bottom. And so he may find himself rhyming with our broader moment, perhaps more than people would assume.

24:22Yeah, Jane, you've reported from Ohio before. That's always what's been fascinating about Sherrod Brown is he always came from sort of the liberal populist wing of the party, right? He's always been talking about economic themes throughout his political career. And it does seem like it fits the moment I meant to mention earlier in the show. So Scott Bessent, the Treasury Secretary, admitted, I think this comment didn't get enough attention, that parts of the U.S. economy might actually already be, quote, in recession. So is that the moment for somebody like Sherrod Brown? It may be. He's not young.

24:57And, you know, I agree. I think it's a tall order to win in Ohio at this point. But he's one of the original populists and he's a progressive populist. You know, I mean, he has a good reason for why he's coming back, which is important, I think, if someone's coming out of a loss, which is to say he hadn't planned to do this. But in watching what Trump's doing, he felt he had to get off the bench and get back in. And so he's got a strong message there. And I think he's quite beloved in his state. So we'll see. I mean, it'll be it'll definitely be a race to watch. Well, speaking of generational change, Jane, and, you know, new faces, as you pointed out, the elections this week have injected a lot of hopeful energy into the Democratic Party and a sense of generational change, not only but especially with Zoran Mamdani's win in New York City.