208. Are the Democrats Too Broke to Win the Midterms?

0:00Anthony Scaramucci:Class it up with Crocs. You know back to school is coming in fast, so why wait to find your new Fave footwear? Step into a local Crocs store and step into your new look. Try it. Style it. Make it yours. Because the right pair doesn't just show up, it shows off. First day fits, handled. Walk out ready for whatever's next. Visit your nearest Crocs store today. that refresh you've been putting off until the right deal came along it's here wayfair's black friday in july sale is happening now so you can finally get the style you've been waiting for for less get up to 80 off area rugs and up to 60 off outdoor and bedroom furniture shop wayfair's huge selection of styles and find the piece to fit your style budget and space plus free shipping Black Friday in July ends July 27th.

0:54Anthony Scaramucci:Shop today at Wayfair.com.

1:21serious symptoms. Allerge your doctor right away as difficulty swallowing, speaking, breathing, eye problems, or muscle weakness can be signs of a life-threatening condition. Patients with these conditions before injection are at highest risk. Side effects may include allergic reactions, neck and injection site pain, fatigue, and headache. Allergic reactions can include rash, welts, asthma symptoms, and dizziness. Don't receive Botox if there's a skin infection. Tell your doctor your medical history, muscle or nerve conditions, including ALS Lou Gehrig's disease, myasthenia gravis or Lambert-Eaton syndrome, and medications, including botulinum toxins, as these may increase the risk of serious side effects.

1:52Anthony Scaramucci:Why wait? Ask your doctor, visit BotoxChronicMigraine.com, or call 1-800-44-BOTOX to learn more.

2:06Anthony Scaramucci:Are the Democrats too broke to win? The party is in debt and mortgaging buildings to raise cash. These midterms will be a referendum on Trump, and with his ratings at an all-time low, this should be the Democrats' year. Nowhere is that struggle playing out more than in Maine. Graham Plattner blew up the Democrats' race. Now Troy Jackson is their nominee for the Senate, but he's out of cash too. Meanwhile, Donald Trump declared war on the press this weekend at a bizarre White House Correspondents' Dinner. Amid jokes about a third term, Nicki Minaj and Gavin Newsom, Trump peppered his rambling speech with pointed attacks on journalists and insults aimed at his rivals.

2:48Anthony Scaramucci:Was this the moment for American press corps to get up and walk out? The relationship looks like it's beyond repair. Welcome to The Rest is Politics US. I'm Katty Kay. Antony is off this week, getting some well-deserved holiday time. So I'm joined by Joe Scarborough, co-host of Morning Joe on MS Now and former Republican congressman from Florida. Let's get into it. I thought this news that came out over the weekend about the Democrats' financial woes was extraordinary. I'll just quickly lay it out for people who have not been following this. There is reporting that the Democratic National Committee, and this is in their June filings basically that have just come out, the Democratic National Committee, which is the group that runs elections, is$2 million in debt.

3:33Anthony Scaramucci:The Republican National Committee has$130 million almost sitting in the bank. With that, I mean, I just, I was, I knew that the Democrats were having problems fundraising. But Joe, in a year when the president has record low approval ratings, people are genuinely worried about cost of living issues. They don't like what's happening in the war in Iran. You've got like a Fox News poll came out last week showing on the top five issues that people are concerned about. They trust the Democrats over the Republicans, but it is a truism of American politics, that you can't win races without money. How did they get themselves into this position where they are literally having to mortgage their own building in order to raise a bit of money from the bank to help support races around the country?

4:21It's pathetic. They went with Ken Martin, who didn't know how to do this, instead of going with Ben Wickler, who helped turn Wisconsin around. Wisconsin had been really gerrymandered and rigged for Republicans for years. It was like the worst example of that. And Ben Wickler turned that around. It could have gone with them, could have gone, should have gone with Rahm Emanuel. Rahm, you know, so some people may not like certain issues where Rahm stands, but Rahm's not going to be running himself here. He's going to be helping Democrats win. So putting Rahm Emanuel in there, who would know how to raise money, know how to spend money, know how to organize it, would have made a difference.

5:04Getting Terry McAuliffe up there, Donna Brazile up there.

5:08Anthony Scaramucci:All these grandees of the Democratic Party. Grandees of the party who, again, may be the, quote, old Democratic faction, but they know how to run. They know how to win. And most importantly, right now, they know how to raise money because it's not going to be Donna Brazile or Rahm Emanuel or Terry McAuliffe on the line. It's going to be John Ossoff. If it's going to be, you know, our candidates that are going, you know, Republican Democratic candidates, it's going to be for Democratic candidates in Ohio and Maine all across the country. And so they need that money. They need it more than ever because the Supreme Court had a decision come down a couple of weeks ago that actually gave parties more power and more authority to spend their money on local races with individual candidates.

5:58So it's more important than ever before. The Democrats have known this was a problem for a very long time. If this had been happening in the Republican Party, then the RNC chair would have been fired months ago. Republicans do not put up with this sort of stuff. And the fact that the Democrats are going around scratching their head going, what do we do? What do we do? Or, oh, boy, if we lose this midterm election, boy, then we'll fire him. wrong approach. They have to win this midterm election and they have to win in 28. And having a guy in there that's having to literally mortgage the building the DNC's in to keep the place running is the wrong person to have.

6:36Anthony Scaramucci:I mean, look, they've got vendors who are being asked, please don't send us any more bills until after the midterm elections. I don't know how your household works, Joe, but it wouldn't go down very well in my household. I wouldn't have any electricity on if I asked people not to be paid. I'm sorry, I can't pay you for a while. I mean, what's odd about this is that we've got a situation where Democrats have what I think in the latest polling that we spoke about on the show last week, an 11 point enthusiasm gap. And I think that is Fox's own polling, maybe CNN's, but it's a vast enthusiasm gap between which is huge.

7:11Anthony Scaramucci:There's so much antipathy towards Trump and midterm elections are often a referendum on the sitting president. So this ought to be, right, by rights, a great year for Democrats. So if they can't make up this money, if they can't get some of those big old dogs of the Democratic Party to pick up the phone and call everybody they know and say, this is a five alarm fire. You need to donate five million. You need to donate 10 million to fill our coffers. Is it just the nature of American politics and American political organizing and the cost of it? even in a social media world where you're not having to buy expensive ad time as much as you used to, is it possible for them to win?

7:54Anthony Scaramucci:Because I'm hearing some rumblings from Republicans saying, we're not feeling as pessimistic about the House as we were a few weeks ago. Right. I mean, because you look at Susan Collins' race when she was running and Grand Platinum was still in there. That race got close because they started piling money in, whether it was in the beginning of the World Cup or baseball games. If you watch a Boston Red Sox game, which goes throughout all of New England, all of Maine. If you watch the World Cup, if you watch any sporting event up in Maine, you would be hit with three, four, five Susan Collins commercials for everyone.

8:30Graham Plattener commercial. I think that's one of the reasons he decided he had to get out because he couldn't keep up with that.

8:36Anthony Scaramucci:These candidates that are getting a lot of national attention in the Democratic Party because they are populist, because they are charismatic. Is the money not necessarily following them? It is for John Ossoff. And I mean, Ossoff's raised a ton of money. And Graham Plattner had raised pretty good money, but he was going to be raising a ton of money in July and August. He was really starting a big campaign fundraising swing then. But the problem is, again, though, they're raising the money and the DCCC has money. The Senate committee has money for Democrats. And a lot of these individual candidates are doing OK.

9:15But it's just it's at the DNC versus the RNC. And it's also the biggest donor. You know, the Washington Post had a story that listed the top 50 donors in American politics. I think something like 40, 45 were Republican. And the reason why is Democrats lost Silicon Valley and they've lost another part of it. The Democrats have another problem, too. There's so much distrust after 24. Donors went all in for Kamala. First of all, you know, after the election, they were angry that Joe Biden hung on too long. Then they were angry that Kamala Harris didn't win because she was supposed to win, even though, you know, Mika and I at least think that Kamala hit all of her marks.

10:02I don't think she's a born natural campaigner, but we thought that she exceeded all expectations. She beat Donald Trump badly in the debate. And on performance alone, you know, she had a good chance of winning. But getting to TV ads, getting the money. I remember watching those NFL ads. You know, I'm sitting there watching NFL on YouTube TV where you can see four screens at once. I'm waiting for the Premier League to allow me to do that.

10:27Anthony Scaramucci:We'll forgive you for being a Liverpool supporter. It's OK. Exactly. So the trans ad started popping up. And yeah, I called somebody new in the campaign communication side and said, you got a problem there. I know nobody in the Democratic Party wants to talk about that, but that's going to not only turn off white working class guys, that's going to turn off black working class guys, that's going to turn off Hispanic working class guys. you're going to have a real problem there if they can keep that up. And they kept running it. Spent like$30 million on that ad alone on the NFL. And it made a big difference.

11:01And they still don't want to admit that because they have such an issue. They cannot say what three out of four Americans say, which is men who have gone through puberty should not be able to compete against women or young girls after they've transitioned. Now, inside the Democratic Party, that's that's I guess maybe that's a radical concept. It's not radical for for most Americans. It's just not. And so but the Democratic Party, Kamala Harris's campaign, they couldn't go out and put an ad out. And it was a very simple ad to put out, which was I think the Lincoln Project put this out, which was, yes, Kamala Harris answered this question this way during an ACLU debate in 2019 that we should pay for transition surgeries for prisoners.

11:55But at that same time, that was Donald Trump's Justice Department policy. That was his Bureau of Prisons policy. And so I said, you don't have to attack trans. You don't have to be hateful like Donald Trump. We should always be compassionate. All of us, Republicans, independents, Democrats, just state those facts. But they wouldn't do it. And they kept lying, saying, well, you know, nobody's paying attention. This isn't showing up in any of our testing. it doesn't test well. Well, the question is, if it didn't test well, then why did Republicans spend$30 million on it and run it in every NFL game for the last month of the campaign?

12:37It did make a difference. And that's the sort of thing that you hear people second guessing. And really quickly, they second guess that decision. And right now you have a lot of moderate Democrats very worried about what's happening in New York City, very worried what's having with DSA candidates.

12:55Anthony Scaramucci:The Democratic Socialists of America. Very worried with all of this stuff, which I personally think has been blown up so much in the media. Yeah, there are some crazy, crazy policy positions held by a lot of these candidates. They're in New York City. I mean, this is, you know, Democrats are electing moderates in moderate swing districts. They're electing moderates to win the governorship of Virginia and New Jersey. You know, these people need to get off the sidelines and start helping the Democratic Party unless they want Donald Trump to have unfettered power the last two years of his presidency.

13:31Anthony Scaramucci:That's interesting. Are you saying that the money issue is a bigger problem at the moment for the midterm elections than the thing that Republicans are going to repeat from now till November every single day in every ad that they run, that there is some kind of red scare taking over America, and socialism is coming to sweep us away. And yeah, we have seen some DSA candidates have some success, but basically it's normies that are having success. I saw the money reports from the DNC and how little money they had, and I thought, that's what got me to prick up my ears. That's what made me think they have a bigger problem.

14:10Yeah, I think so. And this is, you can tell that Donald Trump and Mike Johnson and Republicans have latched on to this. The commies are here. The commies are here. The commies have reached our shore. We've got to fight the commies, which is hilarious, because if you want to talk about socialism, talk about a party where you have its leader actually seizing the means of production for some of our most important companies in America.

14:41Anthony Scaramucci:Talk about that share of intel that he's just taken for the government. Yeah. This is Great Britain, 1978. Let's take some more companies, love. That was for this morning. So people that didn't see my British accent this morning. So anyway, so that's what Margaret Thatcher put behind her in Great Britain. So you have actually Donald Trump going full Clement Attlee here. And you look at him taking over companies. You look at all the tariffs. You look at the fact we have the largest deficit ever. You look at the fact we have the largest national debt ever. You look at the fact that 35 percent of America's national debt that we've accumulated since 1776, 35 percent has been accumulated by Donald Trump and this Republican Congress.

15:33So they're not spending like drunken sailors. They're spending like drunken socialists. So we really don't need small government lectures from the likes of Donald Trump and Mike Johnson. They're the ones that are seizing control of companies, not Democrats.

15:51Anthony Scaramucci:Anthony and I have just recorded a series for our founding members on J.D. Vance. And we were talking at the end of the series about basically this horseshoe effect of politics where J.D. Vance and Bernie Sanders are not that far away from each other on issues like government control and government production. and taking over companies. I mean, it's interesting because J.D. is there too. He is there. He's basically in for kind of a much more conservative Christian form of big government, but you are seeing that from Donald Trump too. Okay, let's zoom in on Maine a bit, which I know is a state you know very well.

16:23Anthony Scaramucci:You spend a lot of time there, you and Mika. We had Troy Jackson being nominated this weekend, and I listened to Troy Jackson's acceptance speech as the nominee for the Democratic candidate for the Senate. And of course, we've reported a lot on this show about Plattner and the blow up of Plattner. And I know that people are saying he's only got 100 days and he hasn't got much charisma and he doesn't have that. And he is a state politician, so he's got some name recognition. And it's going to be very hard for him to kind of break through in just 100 days. But I listened to that 20 minute acceptance speech that he gave over the weekend.

16:59Anthony Scaramucci:I actually found it quite refreshing. I thought here is a candidate who is not making this all about himself. right from the beginning, I found Plattner could be a little angry and a little self-absorbed. Jackson, I thought, took the fight to Susan Collins. He made it about his progressive policies. I've been told from Democrats in Maine, Democratic politicians in Maine, that Susan Collins really is underwater with voters. The number of times she's sided with Donald Trump on issues like abortion, other issues as well, is starting to really grate on people's nerves. Do you think Democrats still have a chance of taking Maine and then taking the Senate?

17:39Anthony Scaramucci:Or is that over, do you think? No, I mean, they definitely have a chance to take Maine. And they've got some problems, though. Susan Collins is a unicorn in that she won Maine by nine points back in 2020. Donald Trump lost it by nine points. So we got to a stage, you know, when we were growing up in America, that happened all the time where you'd have a Democratic candidate doing well in the same state that a Senate Republican candidate was doing well. That stopped happening a long time ago. But now we have, in this case, we've got Susan Collins six years later. She's not as strong of a candidate today as she was back in 2020.

18:26Anthony Scaramucci:Because of the Trump thing or just because of age, because she's been there too long, having said she was going to do two terms and now has done however many it is that she's done, but a lot more. I think siding with Donald Trump, who was extraordinarily unpopular in the state, hurts her. I think breaking her term limits pledge and sticking around for as long as she did has hurt her. And I also do think too that in an era where Joe Biden's age became a disqualifying factor, where Donald Trump's age is becoming a disqualifying factor, where let's just admit it, Janet Mills probably lost the grand platinum in part because her age was seen as a disqualifying factor.

19:05I think Susan Collins, her age may be a disqualifying factor, but I don't think it's ageism. I think it's her ability to campaign effectively.

19:14Anthony Scaramucci:Nancy Pelosi is older. Bernie Sanders is older than Susan Collins, but both of them are far more effective campaigners. Both of them can just do extraordinarily well on the campaign trail. Susan Collins, just as a political athlete, has lost several steps. So I would be surprised if she agreed to do more than one debate because I just don't think she'd be able to get through it. So again, in this era where everybody wants younger candidates, more vital candidates, more dynamic candidates, I think that's probably Susan Cohen's biggest disadvantage right now. So Democrats can win, but they need to raise money for this guy.

19:54Anthony Scaramucci:Yeah, the moment he is. He says that he raised$600 ,000 in the first couple of days. after his nomination. So maybe he can raise enough money. She is seeking her sixth term, having said she was only going to serve two terms. I think that has pissed people off as well. James Blair, who is Donald Trump's huge, big campaign guy for this season, who's around the country trying to get Republicans elected over Democrats, has said that there has basically outlined their strategy, writing that Troy Jackson is a socialist who's flip-flopped on policy, a career politician who keeps losing, an inside who is also unknown.

20:30Anthony Scaramucci:His nomination was illegitimate. He has anger issues and he lacks riz. Riz is Anthony's favorite word. Is really? Yeah, he loves the word riz. He likes to pretend occasionally that he's as young as his youngest children. That he's with the kids. Yeah, he's with the kids. He's hip with the kids. It's a little awkward. It's not as awkward. Well, I don't know, your English accent, British accent and his desire to be able to kind of - Pretty good. Pretty good. That will be good news for Democrats, because I think I had got the impression that after the Platinum meltdown, they thought they didn't have a chance in Maine.

21:01Anthony Scaramucci:But if they do have a chance in Maine and they can hold on to Michigan, they still have some chance of taking the Senate. Exactly. You also have Ohio. You have Iowa. Again, both of those may be longer shots, but on a wave election, those are the type of states that go over. I've always said Texas is fool's gold. I will say you had Beto get within two points of Ted Cruz. Actually, while Beto O 'Rourke was a good candidate, Tallarico is a gifted candidate. He's a great political athlete. And if he can, and I guess they can Paxton. Is a terrible candidate. Horrible. He's the worst candidate. I didn't know how bad he was until I saw a press conference that he had with sheriffs from across the state of Texas.

21:49They asked him like two or three questions and they had to drag him off the stage and hide him. I mean, can you believe that? A candidate in July who will not take questions at a press conference has to be ragged off the stage with sheriffs standing behind him looking at him. What the fuck? Because he can't answer questions. He has so much bad shit in his background that he's been impeached by Republicans. I mean, the ethics violations, everything. So I think that race may be more competitive than Republicans originally expected.

22:28Anthony Scaramucci:I mean, a Texas politician said, political scientist said to me recently, you know, the Texas race is a bit like revolutions. It seems impossible until it happens, and then it seems inevitable when it does happen. And at some point, Democrats will win a statewide seat. It might not be this time around. But the more ice activity there is in Maine, by the way, that is also something that's going to be a real problem for Susan Collins. That main, the ice shooting up in Biddeford, Maine just last week is going to weigh heavily against her. Ice shootings in Texas are also going to be a problem for Ken Paxton because nobody likes them.

23:01I just had a town hall meeting up in Maine and they were deeply affected and deeply offended by the shooting in Maine. And you look at Donald Trump, how well he did in 2020 among Hispanics, especially along the border in Texas, and see how those numbers have completely collapsed even before the shooting in Houston. Those numbers, the support has collapsed. And then you add on top of that the killing of a man who's been in Houston for 30 years, of a father, a great father, a great husband, a great worker. That's just got to gut Ken Paxton's support even more in the Hispanic community. I'm not exactly sure what the White House is thinking.