142. How to Win the Midterms

0:06Welcome to the Restless Politics US Special New Year's Edition Happy New Year to you Katty K Happy New Year, Anthony. I hope you're not too hungover and that you had a good New Year's holiday. Hungover is not me, as you know. That's true. Okay, amped up I am. I took some of the Trump special sauce today. So if I'm a little bit too energetic, push back on me. Okay. But we are here in the Democratic Party Situation Room. You've got Gavin Newsom pulling AOC's hair. okay and she's hitting him over the head with a frying pan i just want to set the visual but we're here in a strategy session caddy to discuss the midterms uh and what the democrats should do to win the midterms now of course we also should say uh the democrats may not have to do anything right because some parties lose elections okay the republicans could self-implode but we don't know that so let's start with you caddy What should the Democrats do to get their game on coming November of this beautiful and bright 2026?

1:15So here we are at the beginning of 2026 and the Democrats are playing strategy about how they can win back the House of Representatives and possibly even the Senate in November's midterm elections. So we're going to put on our strategist hat and see what our advice to them would be if we were being paid by the DNC, the Democratic National Committee. Okay, so here are the stakes. Midterm elections happen midpoint between presidential elections. So they're halfway between 2024 and 2028. You have a midterm election and it's for all of the members of the House. All 435 seats in the House of Representatives are up for grabs because members are only elected for two years.

1:59So they were elected in 2024 and now they have to be re-elected in 2026. A third of the 100-member Senate is also up for grabs, so 35 senators are battling to hold on to their jobs. Republicans, remember, currently control both the House of Representatives and the Senate. and it's a big deal because Donald Trump will have been president for two years. And if Democrats take back one of the chambers, the House of Representatives or the Senate, or both, power in Washington suddenly swings away from the White House. At the moment, Donald Trump has the White House, he has the House of Representatives, he has the Senate.

2:42If he loses the House of Representatives, which most polls suggest is the most likely, and often happens, by the way, two years into a president's term, then a whole load of things change in Washington. Suddenly, the president could be investigated. You can have subpoenas up on Capitol Hill. You can have more pushback against the president's agenda. There's the possibility even that Donald Trump could be impeached if Democrats feel that he's broken any laws. So power will shift. And most importantly, the kind of zeitgeist will shift. This guy who came into office on a kind of whirlwind of activity, seemed like he was omnipotent for much of 2025, seemed like he couldn't do anything wrong, was a hugely expansionist agenda, all of that will suddenly look less viable because the people will have spoken.

3:33And if Democrats can win back the House of Representatives, they will turn around and say, look, the American people do not like what they are seeing. The first chance they had to vote in big numbers as a referendum on Donald Trump's presidency, this is the opinion that the American people have cast. So that's why this matters to all of our listeners around the world. Midterm elections are funny things, Anthony, because it's hard for people to get their grips around what are midterms, why are they even called midterms? But they do, and the House of Representatives obviously can't control policy.

4:06And Donald Trump has done a lot by executive orders. He's kind of avoided Congress. So in some ways, you might say, well, he doesn't even care about Congress. So he's just going to carry on doing his executive order thing and running the presidency by fiat and taking on more powers for the presidency. But I actually think these 2026 midterm elections are hugely important for the Democrats. What do you think the stakes are? Well, I'm going to stipulate here that I think it's going to be very hard for them to win the Senate. Lots of Senate seats are also up. All of the, as you pointed out, all of the House seats are up, but I think it would be hard for them if you go through the math and you look at the charts.

4:45The Republicans are benefiting from what I call the tyranny of the minority, the red states that are less populated in the country. They each get two senators. And so it's going to be very, very hard. But let's go to the House because I think that's where the most likely flip could happen. And I guess if I was sitting in that strategy room with the Democrats and you, Cady, the first thing I would say is, let's not go crazy here on each other. Let's try to focus on what I would call super majority. And I would be channeling my Newt Gindridge and just a little bit of history for people. Way back in 1994, it actually started at the beginning of 1994.

5:27Newt Gingrich had something called a contract with America or a contract for America. He listed all the tenants. This was two years into Bill Clinton's term. Yeah, two years into Bill Clinton's term. He said, okay, this is what we want everybody to sign up for. And we're going to coalesce around this. I'm going to come in and be the Speaker of the House if we win the majority. And then it's going to be me against President Clinton. And I would try to remind people that that works. And so prioritizing a super majority idea, don't eat your young, don't go too far to the left. I know Zoran Mondani won in New York, and I think that's sending a signal to the hard left of the Democratic Party.

6:09But as you pointed out on our podcast, there were two centrist wins for the governorship last year. That would include the win in Virginia and the win in New Jersey. And so I would say successful candidates are going to be the ones that stay to the middle. Let's not have an arms race to the hard left. That would be my first thing I would want everybody to stick to. And then let's talk about affordability because I don't think affordability is going away. Even if prices do come down, oil prices are down, gas prices are down, Federal Reserve will likely be cutting interest rates going into the middle of 2026.

6:49And that may mean that prices will be lower. I think what the president really does want when they sit in their strategy sessions is got to get the housing market moving. You know, you got to have a 50, 75 basis point cut in interest rates, which will make housing more affordable. And remember, and I've said this often, but I want to explain this to people, small businesses are where the jobs growth is. And 60 % of our small businesses, the United States, caddy, are tied to housing. If you go down to your local main street in every small town, there's a hardware store, there's a subway shop to feed the contractors, there's plumbers, there's electricians, 60 % of small businesses tied to housing.

7:35And so if I'm a Democrat, I'm going to accept I'm going to see to that I'm going to say yeah inflation may be lower but life is too expensive and I would go into the ways we as Democrats could lower prices or make things a little bit less expensive let me play the democratic strategist who's arguing from the left which I'm not saying is necessarily what I think is the way they have to go I actually think they have to do a district by district evaluation that the candidate that runs in New York City is not the candidate that can run in rural Virginia, for example. But let me make the case from the left as I'm sitting here around our crisis meeting for the midterm elections.

8:15The left has the energy in the Democratic Party at the moment. Bernie Sanders brought out 300 ,000 people with AOC when they did that fighting the oligarchy tour last year. Zoran Mamdani has captured the medium of social media. We're living in an age where caution is not possible. Candidates have to take risks because that's what social media and podcasts and the way they get their message out demand. They don't like candidates who have too much caution, who play it to the center. The country is divided. Young people want to see people fighting for them and they tend to be more progressive. They are the ones that are particularly suffering from the housing issues that you've just laid out, Anthony, the rents that they can't pay.

9:01So actually, all of this stuff, what was it that Mamdani said, don't bow to the altar of caution. We have to actually make sure we galvanize people. It's hard to get people to the polls in midterm elections. There isn't a single candidate that they can rally around. Turnout tends to be lower in midterm elections. So we need to get fire in their bellies and you don't get fire in their bellies by being too centrist and by being too cautious. What about that argument? I hear the argument, but I want to win. And so what I would tell people is whether you like it or not, the culture has shifted on you.

9:36Donald Trump has explained that to people. There were 19 swing districts in 2024, swing, they're very purple, that are now controlled by the Republicans. And by the way, if you look at current polling in those districts, it's narrowing again. they're becoming purple again. And typically those districts have a lot of independence caddy that want centrism and they want common sense more than they want ideology. And so to me, I want to go back after those 19 districts that are now held by Republicans. By the way, There are 14 districts that are also swing districts that are very narrow Democratic wins.

10:25Okay, so if you look through the whole map, there's 33 districts that are in play, 19 of which are controlled by the Republicans right now, 14 of which are controlled by Democrats, but they're all loosey-goosey. It's crazy, isn't it? I mean, when you say that, it's still crazy that out of 435 seats, there's only like 30-odd that are actually in play. Well, that's what's happened through gerrymandering, right? It's so crazy. So we understand this. You know, it's 8 % of the house is in swing. The rest of it has been resolved through the fight of gerrymandering. The election was over as a result of the redistricting before the election started.

11:04But you've got to focus on those areas. And so I would be saying to those people, yes, I hear you. Yes, I understand that. I understand that you want purity and you have righteous ideology. And I understand all of that. but I think you want to win. Take a page from Donald Trump's playbook about winning. Okay. The Republicans are clearer. Okay. The Democrats have always been well-intentioned, Caddy, but more abstract. And when you're abstract, you're losing the independent voter. That's the thing I would say to these guys, you know? And by the way, housing is going to be a big issue. Trump brought up housing, Caddy, in his pre-Christmas speech from the diplomatic room that 9 p.m.

11:47speech. We're in short supply and the prices are going up. And you know this, housing is eating the paycheck of the American. It's making it very difficult for Americans that own houses or are renting. It's making it very difficult for them to have other disposable income due to the rising prices. And so you want to talk to people about fast tracking, permits, multifamily housing, starter homes. The Democrats are talking about putting tax penalties on institutional investors that are hoarding single family homes. These big private equity companies have gone into these areas and bought swaths and swaths of housing, and they're pushing the prices up.

12:33You got to get in there and talk about these issues and explain to the American people that you have affordability policies, I'm going to say market-based affordability policies, not socialist-based, because the Americans get turned off by that. Maybe that works in New York City, but I don't think it's going to work in the mainstream American congressional district. I think they have realized that affordability is a winning issue for them. They'll be talking about that. Over the course of the new year, 22 million Americans will have found suddenly that their healthcare is a lot more expensive.

13:09They'll add that into the affordability issue too and push for things on more subsidies on healthcare or cheaper healthcare for Americans. I think the other thing they have to figure out what to do and how to talk about it is how to talk about immigration because they've run away since the 2024 election. Democrats have run away from the whole subject of immigration like it was a burning hot coal that somebody had put in their hands and they don't want to talk about immigration because they realize that Joe Biden didn't do enough to shut the border. Hundreds of thousands of people came across which helped Donald Trump win in 2024.

13:45And so they basically dropped the subject. But actually, those elections in New Jersey and Virginia showed a huge swing of Hispanic voters away from Donald Trump. Hispanic voters are in a way the new swing voter. In 2024, they sided with Donald Trump because of prices. In those off-year elections in Virginia and New Jersey last year, the biggest shift was young voters and Hispanic voters. And I think that a lot of the polling suggests that Hispanic voters don't like what they see with these ice crackdowns, particularly when American citizens of Hispanic origin have been picked up and arrested.

14:23And we saw in that Susie Wiles profile in Vanity Fair that you and I spoke about at the end of last year, she actually admitted that some young person had been arrested who was an American citizen, she said, oh, well, that was just an overzealous ICE agent that did that. So the White House has a problem around this overactive ICE operations around the country. And Democrats, I think, need to be able to capitalize on that as a talking point, whilst also saying we're going to have border security. So there are things they can talk about. And if they get those themes going, I think this issue of progressivism versus pragmatism because Abigail Spanberger was the one who said in her race for the Virginia governorship, it's pragmatism versus partisanship and we have to go with pragmatism every time.

15:11So you've got the kind of two polar opposites there between her and Mamdani. I think they can finesse this in the midterms because they have multiple candidates in multiple states with different needs. You just got to find the right candidate, support the right message for those people. But hone in on affordability. That's your number one issue. Find a way to talk about immigration, keep the borders safe, but highlight the cases of ICE deporting or arresting American citizens because that could also play to your advantage in the midterm elections. Okay, we're going to take a break and come back and talk about specific states.

15:47And I want to look at the state of Maine, not just because my son has recently moved out there, because it's got an interesting political case that highlights some of these broader themes.

16:01Welcome back to The Rest is Politics US and our democratic strategy session on how to win back something for the Democrats in the midterms. We're trying to give them some advice here, putting on our democratic strategist hats. If we were running this election, how would we run it? Mind you, actually, no one's called us, Anthony, to say, can you come and run any election, which is probably either on the Republican side or the Democratic side. I do it. No one's ever called me to run anything. No, the Democrats would probably be more likely to call than the Republicans. Let's face that. But let's talk about the Republicans for a second, because if I was in a Republican strategy meeting, I would say, listen, we're not doing great on affordability.

16:42Obviously, the ICE stuff that you're bringing up, Caddy's hurting us. But there's still a culture war going on out there. And let's create as many trap doors as possible for Democrats to step into related to the culture war. OK, and Trump keeps bringing it up. You know, the the transgenders are playing in women's sports, you know, this sort of thing. The military is being mistreated. The the immigrants are overrunning the emergency rooms at your local hospital. The crime rate is super high. This is stuff that they're going to chant going into the midterms. And so what's the best course of action, Katty?

17:23Be the coach and tell people how to avoid the trap doors that the Republicans are going to be laying down in late 2026. I think this is the biggest challenge for Democrats. And it's where they haven't got their message sorted out because they want to be the party of inclusion. They don't want to be the party that says we are against transgender members of our society, but they don't know how to talk about it in a way that doesn't alienate centrist American voters and also doesn't alienate the left of their party. And I think actually Gavin Newsom has done a couple of interesting interviews on this recently where he said, look, I am for protecting minority groups in our population.

18:10I think the sign of a healthy democracy is that we look out for people who are in the minority and who are the disadvantaged. But I also believe that there is a thoughtful debate to be had about transgender women playing in female sports. And he comes down on the line that that is unfair to women. So are we actually also protecting the women and girls in our society if we were allowing transgender women to play in those sports? I mean, ideally, Democrats would find a way to have this conversation, move on from it very fast, but not fall into the trap of just playing to the left of their party.

18:52And I think that was the problem they had in the 2024 election. They got themselves caught up in knots. They didn't know where to push back. um they had they became you know tarnished with this she's Kamala Harris is for they them we're for you and it really damaged them because it it just played into this perception that they're the woke party so they've got to find a way to move on from that drop the moral superiority I mean that's I think the at heart I've been thinking about this issue of wokeism recently at heart But the problem with it is it makes one group sound like they have all the moral cards to play and that they are the better people and that we know best.

19:36And if you believe this, you're a bad person. If you want the border shot, you are racist. If you don't allow transgender women to play in sports, you're kind of against minorities. I mean, that is what they it's tonal. They've got to get over that moral superiority tone. And there is an opportunity. I agree with you. In some of these races around the countries in the midterms, if I'm playing Republican strategist now, I'm saying push Democrats hard on that because they can't resist sounding like they're morally superior and voters find that a real turnoff. You know, first of all, I agree with you, but how likely or how willing will the Democrats be in terms of accepting that sort of strategy?

20:23See, that to me is the problem right there. I think there's a big rub, Gaddy. I mean, take somebody like Bernie Sanders. Bernie Sanders is not particularly woke, right? I mean, this is the horseshoe theory of populism that, you know, you bend it around far enough and Bernie Sanders starts sounding like Steve Bannon at certain points. He's not interested in wokeism. He's interested in economic populism. And that is the card you have to play. You've got to play the affordability card. And there's a very interesting place. Let's dig into this because in the last half, you said that you don't think the Democrats will take back the Senate.

20:56I tend to agree. But there are states, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, I don't know why they all begin with Ms. Anyway, a whole bunch of states where actually the Democrats have some chance of winning back the Senate. And there's a very interesting race happening up in Maine that gets to some of these issues of pragmatism versus political purity and being on the left of the party. There's both a kind of generational fight going on and this progressive versus centrist fight going on. You've got Susan Collins, who's the 73-year-old sitting senator who's been there since the dinosaurs, as long as I can remember.

21:41She's a frequent critic of Donald Trump. She's kind of a moderate Republican senator, one of the few left in this swing state in Maine. she is being now challenged by the Democrats they think they can unseat Susan Collins which would be kind of seismic in Senate history that's getting a little bit in the weeds and nerdy but anyway in Washington terms that counts as big news and she's being challenged by the Democrats but the Democrats have their own fight going on and the two people who are trying to unseat Susan Collins who are fighting for the nomination one of them is Governor Janet Mills who's been a critic of Donald Trump.

22:18She is also a popular, moderate governor. Normally, she would be a shoo-in for the opportunity to unseat Susan Collins, but she's 77 years old and she's being challenged now by a 41-year-old who has a super interesting background, Graham Plattner, who is a former oyster farmer, former military veteran, who is coming at this much more from the kind of economic populist point of view. He's not a particularly woke progressive, but he's talking about things like affordability. All of those issues, Anthony, that you're talking about that young people are really concerned about, about housing, about rent, about childcare.

22:57And he's going around Maine. I've seen him speaking and he's very kind of down to earth, very folksy, very Maine. He's a great candidate for that state. He's had some controversial issues around text messages about the police and about racial issues. But he's popular even despite that, he's super popular in Maine because he has that sort of authentic populism that Mamdani manages to embody as well. And he's really talking about the affordability issues. And he's got the age thing. There's a big generation, don't underestimate that, too in these midterm elections, young candidates saying to older candidates, particularly in the Democratic Party, it's time for you guys to step out of the way.

23:41It's our time now. We are the ones that understand how hard it is to make rent, how hard it is to pay for childcare. I think it's very well said. But again, going to those 30 or so districts, let's look at the demographics of those districts. Okay, most are suburban. Most of those districts are housing stressed. These are places like upstate New York, Westchester County, suburban Philly, suburban Pittsburgh. Okay. These are people that in my mind are tired. They're overworked and they're not necessarily ideological. Moreover, the Trump style rhetoric helps GOP turnout. We know this, you know, you, you can sit there as a Democrat and say, oh, Trump is a liar and Trump's lying about this.

24:32Trump's lying about that. But Trump knows how to press launch codes. He knows how to press buttons on his base to get them to vote. And you know these elections are so tight, Caddy, that there's an incremental swing voter that if Trump's rhetoric is bringing out the GOP, okay, you've got to be in a position to try to throttle that down, okay? So you've got to talk about cost of living competence. You got to talk about housing and how you're going to improve their ability to buy a house, secure a house. You got to go after the healthcare situation. Okay? At the end of this congressional term, starting in 2027 January, 22 million people are coming off the healthcare.

25:23Those people may be in your swing district. you've got to explain to them what's going to happen to them if they don't get the check of a democrat coming into the house and that's i think where you're going to see uh all of the money that will be spent in these midterm elections and there's probably going to be i don't know if it's going to be a billion that gets spent totally but i wouldn't be surprised given how much presidential elections cost all of that money that is already being raised and is already being spent in these key swing districts is going to focus on those things, right? It has to if it's going to cut through because you've got 45 % of American voters saying that the most important factor deciding their vote is a candidate's position on the cost of living.

26:07So I feel so bad for you, but if you live in one of those swing districts, expect an avalanche of ads between now and November. You are going to be inundated with ads telling you what a candidate's position is on things like housing, on things like healthcare. So a couple of the ads where people, they're already spending money because it's interesting, I've been told by democratic strategists that they are spending money earlier this year for this year's midterm elections than they ever have done before. They're targeting about 50 races around the countries where they're really spending big money.

26:46And they have already started putting ads up in some of those races they're running independent uh expenditure ads in the senate seat in pennsylvania um they are already targeting new york's 17th district that's very near you anthony the republican held swing district of mike lawler they see that as a realistic pickup they're a bunch of uh house seats in pennsylvania that they're targeting there's an interesting house seat down in florida florida's 13th district They're already targeting that one. So they're dotted around the country. You're suddenly going to see an avalanche of these political ads, all targeting, I think, issues like health care and housing.

27:30Remember this, the president's strategy, as we're sitting here talking to you, at the dawn of this new year, inflation is trending down. A recent CPI number was 2.7, down from 3.1. And so it's trending down. that's going to give some space to the new Federal Reserve Chairman to lower rates going into the midterms. Trump is going to take credit for all of that. You've got to speak to these people and say, hey, man, we're here to cut your costs. We're here to cut your drug costs. We're here to help you with your rent. Okay. We're here as the competence party. Republicans are shouting, but we can cut the costs.