The GOP's Midterm Convention / Ex-Aides Turn On Sen. John Fetterman

0:00Congress has talked about permitting reform for decades. Now it's time to actually do it and secure our affordable energy future. Pass permitting reform now. Paid for by the American Petroleum Institute.

0:17From the opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal, this is Potomac Watch. The Republican Party prepares for a rare midterm convention this week in Dallas. A growing alarm in the GOP that a blue wave might be coming its way this November. Plus, former staff for Pennsylvania's progressive Senator John Fetterman turn on him, accusing their former boss of checking out of the job. Welcome, I'm Kyle Peterson with The Wall Street Journal. We're joined today by my colleagues on the WSJ's opinion pages, columnists Kim Strassel and Barton Swaim. An old chestnut is that political campaigns only start in earnest after Labor Day.

1:00Summer vacations then have ended. Kids are back in school and voters are really starting to think about politics and the November campaign. Whether or not that's really true, the Republican Party this week is gathering in Dallas to pitch voters on another two years in control of Congress. Vice President J.D. Vance scheduled to speak on Wednesday, followed on Thursday by a presidential address. And this comes amid growing concern about the shape of the November elections to come. The Cook Political Report on the House side suggests that there are 21 toss-up races, and only five of them are currently held by Democrats, the other 16 by Republicans, giving Democrats a clear edge there.

1:43And then also growing concern about maybe the Senate at stake, too, despite a map that is favorable to the GOP. Let's listen to Ted Cruz on Fox News today explaining the goal of this midterm convention. And the president is doing this convention because he wants to really focus on the issues and the stakes of the election, sometimes in midterms. Midterms are often difficult for the party in power. And the reason historically is the party in power, those voters often stay home. And you have a dynamic. What I described earlier in the Paxton race, we see all over the country, which is the left is energized and the right.

2:21Look, Republicans are in charge of the White House and Congress. They feel a little complacent. Sometimes they're unhappy about this or that. I get all of that. There are times to say we ought to be doing more. We ought to be accomplishing more. This cycle right now is we're two months out. It looks bumpy. There are five, six, seven Senate seats that could go the wrong way. Kim, five, six, even seven Senate seats that could be in play. How do you size things up as we sit here now after Labor Day looking toward November? Ted Cruz makes a really good point that history is against Republicans. And it is true.

2:54If you are the party in power, you bear all the responsibility for anything that voters are unhappy about. Midterms tend to be very tough on the party that holds the White House and Congress. So I get all that. at the same time, there's a certain sense of deja vu here. It reminds me of the 2020 election where Republicans looked like they were going to hold the Senate majority and all they needed to do was win just one of two runoff races in Georgia for the Senate. And instead, Trump, we all remember this, he made those races a referendum on his arguments about the stolen 2020 election. and GOP turnout crashed.

3:38Democrats won both seats. By the way, I would note the consequences of that. This was not just bad for Republicans, but that is what allowed Biden to push through all the ruinous policies that were so hard on the economy, whether COVID blowouts, expansion of government infrastructure bills, the semiconductor industrial policy we did, massive inflation, huge hardship for Americans, which, by the way, Republicans now own as they own this White House. So real consequences. And that's where this seems to be headed. As Cruz noted, there are five or six seats in jeopardy. And some of those you expected them to be tough, like Maine, North Carolina.

4:19But the ones that I would note that shouldn't necessarily be in jeopardy, Alaska, Ohio, Texas, Iowa. There are some worries about Kansas and Nebraska. And the reason that is happening because of a president that has a very poor approval rating at the moment and who has enacted a lot of policies that have been very tough, in particular for the farm belt. His tariff policy is what's put that Iowa seat into play, for instance. His involvement in certain primaries is why he ended up with a very flawed candidate in Texas, putting that state in play. I'm talking here about Ken Paxton. So there feels like a lot of own goals going on here that are also contributing to what was already going to be a difficult environment, but where if you could look at the White House, it feels as though they're also doing everything they can to make even more Senate seats vulnerable and put the party in an even worse position.

5:20Second, Kim, on a couple of thoughts. One is on those 2021 runoffs in Georgia. Remember, Democrats after the 2020 election, even after Biden won, were expecting to be in divided government. And if Republicans had held on to only one of those seats, that's what would have happened. You would not have had all these historians coming into the White House and whispering in Joe Biden's ear, listen, you now have complete control of Washington. You can be the next FDR. And it would have been a completely different four years, maybe the kind of Biden presidency that many voters in 2020 thought they were going to be getting with the president acting as dealmaker in Congress.

6:02And Barton, the November elections that we have coming now do seem like they have a similar sort of flavor. President Trump all but pushed out Tom Tillis in North Carolina, the retiring senator who has now been a thorn in the side of the administration in his final months in office. Many people seem to think that the North Carolina race is pretty leaning heavily toward Democrats now. Similar sort of dynamic in Texas, the endorsement of Ken Paxton instead of incumbent Senator John Cornyn. And Barton, I know that Texas has been the white whale for Democrats for a long time now, but the real clear politics polling average has the Democratic nominee, James Tallarico, up by 2.5 points.

6:47One of the questions that has now been circulating is how much money Republicans might have to spend in Texas in order to make up that difference and keep Ken Paxton competitive, and whether President Trump is going to open his fundraising wallet, something like$400 million, according to news reports. In order to do that, Keep in mind, that is also money that the GOP can't spend elsewhere. And one of the dynamics happening in Texas is that Republicans, just ordinary Republican voters, many of them, especially the ones in the suburbs and traditionally supported John Cornyn, they're going to stay home because Ken Paxton is an extremely off-putting individual, scandal prone.

7:30He's been impeached by his own party. He survived that impeachment. successful prosecutions for corruption, a lot of personal baggage there. And Republicans are just not, many of them, interested enough to get out and go to the polls. That's the danger. Look, Trump has always had this superhuman ability to say and do things against his own political interest. It's amazing. At this point, it's almost part of his brand, I would say. And you have to wonder how successful he'd be if he didn't do this. I mean, we talked about Georgia forcing Tillis out for really no reason. That seat will likely go to a Democrat, Roy Cooper, although I think Michael Watley is a good candidate.

8:14He keeps badgering Republicans about the SAVE Act, which is not going to pass and which is not necessary. And of course, that dampens GOP turnout because many people think, well, the vote is corrupt. Why even vote? And I think, amazingly, you could even expand this weird ability Trump has to harm his own interest to the international sphere, where he managed to get Mark Carney elected prime minister of Canada, when Pierre Polievre was almost certainly going to win that election. And Trump started talking about making Canada another state. So as I say, you wonder how successfully he would be if he didn't have this strange tick to destroy his own political interest.

8:56On the other hand, if he didn't have that, he wouldn't really be Trump, I guess. Hang tight. We'll be right back in a moment. Congress has talked about permitting reform for decades. Now it's time to actually do it and secure our affordable energy future. Pass permitting reform now. Paid for by the American Petroleum Institute. This is Matthew Hennessey, the editor of Free Expression. I want to personally invite you to come check out what we're doing, signing up for the newsletter couldn't be easier. Just go to our homepage. Directly below the Wall Street Journal logo, you'll find the magic words, free expression wedged between opinion and arts.

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10:06Welcome back. On the Senate side, one emerging point of note is New Hampshire, which is having its primary actually today. Voters go into the polls there. The Republican candidate for Senate is former Senator John E. Sununu of the famed Sununu family. the son and brother of former governors of New Hampshire. On the Democratic side, Congressman Chris Pappas is trying to fend off a challenge for that nomination from a Democratic socialist opponent. But some suggestion, while this has not so far been rated a toss-up race, some suggestion in the polling that John Sununu might actually be a strong candidate and maybe could put a Republican pickup unexpectedly on the board for the GOP.

10:52But Kim, to the point about the message from President Trump, the White House, the Republican Party, part of the challenge, I think, is that Trump's job approval rating in the RealClearPolitics average now is 39.7 percent under 40. And the administration is not changing its tune on any of the things that seem to be upsetting to voters, inflation, tariffs, the deportation chaos in Minneapolis. And meanwhile, President Trump is raging at Republicans about not passing the Save America Act and doing some kind of national election law takeover. And yet here's the GOP's explanation of what it intends with this midterm convention.

11:34It says the message is simple. Americans want strong borders and sound immigration policies, not sanctuary cities and the unspeakable crime that comes with them. They want to continue to reap the profound benefits of the one big, beautiful bill. Parents want common sense approach to education, youth sports and school choice, not a liberal lecture on transgender rights. And so it suggests to me that Republicans, President Trump, they think they can win this election simply by running against the extremism on the socialist candidates on the left. And there's definitely some material to work with there, Kim.

12:09But it seems to me that voters are still going to be asking the questions they have been asking. Why is inflation coming down? Are the tariffs contributing to higher prices that are affecting me? You know, and I'm still not seeing a really good answer from the Trump administration to those issues. Yeah. One quick point I just wanted to make about New Hampshire, which is that I think there's an interesting lesson here for Republicans. they've got two good pickup opportunities for the Senate this year. One is Michigan and one is New Hampshire. And what you see in both of those states is very strong mainstream candidates.

12:44Candidates, by the way, have some name recognition in the state, which is good, but have also been willing to separate themselves a little bit or suggest that they would be independent of this White House to a certain degree. They have not jumped all over the MAGA label. And in these swing states, I think that that's really important. So something just to bear in mind. On the message, yes, this is going to be the big question of this midterm convention is, are all we going to hear about is past successes? And by the way, let's give Republicans their due. They did save the country from a more than$4 trillion tax hike.

13:24There has been a great deal of very good deregulation, good energy policy. The border is now in a far better position, obviously, than it was. The problem is that voters are always asking, what have you done for me lately? What are you doing for me next? And that's the question of whether or not at this midterm convention, all the Republicans gathered together, whether or not they say some of that while they're on the stage or at the very least behind the scenes, make some sort of plan for what they want to pass in the few weeks that they have remaining in Congress that might give them some sort of leg up and more that they can offer voters in terms of what they hope to do about inflation and cost of living issues.

14:10The point about banging on socialism and communism, that could potentially be effective if Republicans did it the right way. But it's always that if, right? If they're just going to yell, ooh, scary communists, I have a message for you. Most Americans, unfortunately, do not even know what communists are anymore, especially the younger generation. Our education system is not that good. So you need to actually spell out the policies that Democrats are proposing and make them own it and then ask the Americans if that's what they want to choose. I don't see a lot of Republicans doing that so far. I do want to throw out two quick caveats just on the messaging thing.

14:51And because this gets to the socialism point, I think that there are two things that are still potentially important for Republicans in this election that aren't necessarily getting the attention they should. One is that Democrats really are running much more on an extremist message this year. And so to that degree, they are making this a little bit of a choice election, which I think is notable. There's no attempt to try to feint toward the middle. I mean, a lot of candidates are talking about affordability, but they've now been tagged with this Democratic Socialist of America label and candidates like El Sayed in Michigan.

15:25I think that's interesting. The other thing is we've had some absolutely rotten polling this year, really huge misses. And that seems to be in part because a lot of polling agencies are overestimating certain categories of voters who might come out, at least in the primaries and particularly younger voters. I just want to throw that out there and have everybody bear that in mind going forward, because we don't really know what that means in terms of some of the polls we're seeing now. Hang tight. We'll be right back after one more break. Congress has talked about permitting reform for decades.

16:01Now it's time to actually do it and secure our affordable energy future. Pass permitting reform now. Paid for by the American Petroleum Institute.

16:14Don't forget, you can reach the latest episode of Potomac Watch anytime. Just ask your smart speaker. Play the Opinion Potomac Watch podcast.

16:25From the Opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal, this is Potomac Watch. Welcome back. Let's turn to the leaks, or maybe the deluge would be a better way to say it. Coming out of John Fetterman's office, the Pennsylvania progressive senator, some of this has been reported in the press, claims that he is checked out of the job and promises of more notably. Barton, there's now a Twitter account that says it is a group of former Fetterman staffers who are disgusted with what he's become. And this account is saying, set your calendar for September 14th, the day the Senate is back in session for our first drop, unquote.

17:06Remarkable, some of what's coming out here is actually leaked text messages between former aides and a sitting United States senator. What do you make of this, Barton? A minute ago, I talked about Trump's tendency to harm his own interests, and the Democrats really have the same thing as a party. Fetterman is a consistent vote for the Democrats, really, on taxes, spending, most cultural issues, climate, guns, health care. He's right there with them. But he has a few very limited differences with the party. Most importantly, he is a loud supporter of Israel, and he totally rejects the anti-Israel left.

17:45That annoys a lot of people. He supported Trump on the Iran war, and a couple of times he voted with Republicans on procedural things like ending the government shutdown. And also, he opposes abolishing ICE and abolishing the police, and he'll say so, unlike most Democrats who actually hold those opinions also, but they won't say so. So take that all together. And this has really started to get under a lot of Democrats' skin, especially on the progressive left. They should be thanking him, incidentally, because by coming out against abolishing the police and so on, he's really doing them a favor and making them look slightly more normal.

18:23But that's not the way they see it. His staffers, former staffers, we should point out, are leaking to the press, screencaps of old texts. And the message seems to be that he's blowing off meetings with constituents, that he didn't go to a funeral for a fallen officer. Now, his office has pushed back strongly against these things and made available photos of meeting with those same constituent groups, pointing out that he met with the fallen officer's family, even though he didn't go to the funeral. All this started, incidentally, last year with a piece by one of his former staffers, Adam Jentleson in the New York Magazine.

19:01And so you're going to see not in this election, but he's up for reelection in 2028, a steady drip drip of stories about how he's checked out of his job and he doesn't show up for meetings. That's not really what any of this is about. This is about politics. Fetterman is the one guy willing to say that super woke stuff is insane. And for that his party wants to punish him. And that is really all it's about. I think it goes back to the 2022 election in which many progressives thought that they were going to have a reliable left winger in John Fetterman. And they were shocked when he actually has a mind of his own.

19:39He had a stroke, if you remember, in that primary. And I interviewed him, I guess, early last year. And he told me that he nearly died in that stroke. And coming out of it made him look at politics differently. And he thinks that the Democratic base wants him to say really nasty things about Republicans, and he just doesn't want to. He just doesn't see it that way anymore. So he's happy to go on, you know, Fox News, you know, crime of the century for a Democrat. And I think also the anti-Israel protests right after the October 7th attack by Hamas really jolted his worldview and made him stand up for Israel in a remarkable way.

20:18So this is not really about missing constituent meetings. It's about his tendency to say the unsayable. And that's about the extent of it. Fetterman is now responding to some of these specific claims. One of them was that he wasn't feeling well. So he skipped a meeting with paralyzed veterans who wanted to discuss health care. And then later that day, he showed up at the office and did a hit on Fox News. Here is Fetterman in a statement to CNN. He says, it was my intention to meet with the group prior to the meeting. I was at home throwing up. So I asked my staff to continue with the meeting, which they did.

20:50Hours later, I felt well enough to continue the day as scheduled, unquote. Kim, I tend to agree with Barton here. When political party, when staffers agree with what an officeholder is doing, there is a lot of covering for them. I mean, recall the omerta on discussing Joe Biden's decline until it became undeniable during the 2024 election. Or you can find examples also in the Senate. Dianne Feinstein, for example. Finally, some news reporting about her aging. But it's notable here that Fetterman, some of these staffers, I think, maybe joined his office wanting and hoping, intending to agree with him, now finding themselves in disagreement with him.

21:33But what a betrayal of your employer to start leaking text messages that this U.S. senator sent you when you were at the office. Well, that's what's so insidious about this particular takedown of John Fetterman is that no one's having an open discussion about why they don't like John Fetterman. Instead, there's this behind the scenes organized operation between these disillusioned, angry staffers who thought that they were going to run John Fetterman and decide how he was going to vote and how he would be perceived in Washington. And instead, he's actually making his own decisions. So they leave in a huff.

22:14And now they're talking to the media and they're leaking all of this nasty with a clear intention of trying to encourage a primary run against him in 2028. It's a total hatchet job. And it's obvious for anyone who watches this all the time. We know exactly what we're seeing. But that's kind of what makes it more egregious is that all of those participating in it are assuming many voters won't know what they're seeing. and that they might actually buy some of this smear out there that he's not showing up for the job. The other thing that I think is really worth pointing out is that this is not just about John Fetterman.

22:51This is sending a message. And don't take it from me. I mentioned Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee in Michigan's Senate race. He is one of the lead spokesmen for the anti-Israel wing of the party and pretty ruthless. And he came out and said one of his top priorities, if he is elected, would be defeating Fetterman in a 28 primary. And here was his quote, you put one ogre on a pike and then everyone else gets the message, end quote. Okay, so that's what this is about. It's not just him. It's about saying we have zero tolerance for dissent in this party. Remember that, John Fetterman. Remember Kyrsten Sinema.

23:32Remember Joe Manchin. this is what happens you get hounded out of office so salute get in line also staffers will run your life it's really kind of and i would also point out the difference here the republicans might look at times as though they are a hot mess because they can't get together on anything but that's in part because there's still some vigorous debate within the party that is still generally tolerated not by all some would like to see folks run out but there's generally still a debate this This is not the case in the Democratic Party, where if you step away from the party line on just one or even two issues, you are no longer welcome.

24:12Thank you, Kim and Barton. Thank you all for listening. You can email us at pwpodcast at wsj.com. If you like the show, please hit that subscribe button. And we'll be back tomorrow with another edition of Potomac Watch. Congress has talked about permitting reform for decades. Now it's time to actually do it and secure our affordable energy future. Pass permitting reform now. Paid for by the American Petroleum Institute.