US President Donald Trump’s approval ratings are hitting record lows, the Democrats are widely considered the likely big winners of the upcoming midterm elections on November 3. What’s your view?
History strongly suggests that the party that is out of power will pick up seats in midterm elections. In November, the Democrats could win back control of one or both houses of the US Congress. And Trump’s sagging poll numbers reinforce that history.
Trump is not just unpopular; he is extremely unpopular. The only president who had worse ratings was Richard Nixon in August of 1974, when he was just days away from leaving office in disgrace. And so, we have a situation, in fact, where a president who at best is supported by one-third of this country is governing as if he’s a king or a czar. And you know, on the 250th anniversary of this nation, it is a pretty astonishing fact.
So, if anything, the mystery is why the Democrats are not poised to have an even bigger win. That tells you a lot about some of the structural dysfunction of our political system right now, as well as the real divisions that exist within the Democratic Party, as well as within the Republican Party and the country as a whole.
What are the Democrats currently offering voters, beyond criticism of Trump? What do they stand for?
Frankly, that has been a debate for the entire 10 years that Donald Trump has dominated our politics. In some respects, he unites the Democratic Party like nothing else. He has been a divider in the country—to allude to the title of the book “The Divider,” which my husband Peter Baker and I wrote about Trump’s first term—but a uniter of Democrats. It’s the one thing that an otherwise fractured party can agree upon.
We’re still finishing the primary season here in the United States, when each party picks their candidates for the House of Representatives and the Senate as well as for the gubernatorial races. Inevitably, the primary season highlights the divisions within the parties. So, I think you can make too much of it that there are these ideological rifts inside the Democratic Party, as well as the Republican Party. But I wouldn’t understate them either.
And Democrats right now, because they don’t have a single leader—and our system is very focused increasingly on one big leader at a time—the result is that you have this almost cacophony of different voices, and the national media tends to amplify races where the contrast is starkest. We’re having this conversation on a Tuesday in early August when there’s a Michigan Senate primary among Democrats, which is hotly contested. It’s very, very likely that the further left candidate will win that race. And there will be much commentary about what does this mean for the future in the Democratic Party to pick such a far-left candidate in Michigan, which is a battleground state, and, in fact, is one of the more evenly divided between the two parties.
Generally speaking, Democrats would be very wary of picking far-left candidates if they want to win additional seats in November. They need to appeal to moderates and independents who might vote for either party, who might not be inclined to vote for somebody who wants to abolish our immigration service and take other very far-left positions. So, you can’t say Democrats stand for one thing or another because that’s still being hashed out—and probably not during these midterms, but in the 2028 Democratic primaries for the US presidential election when they figure out what kind of a candidate and with what ideological views they will be bringing to the presidential race.
The state of the US economy should help the Democrats…
Yes, the far left as well as the center of the Democratic Party agree that prices are too high in America, that Donald Trump is to blame for them, and that voters are so angry that that’s what they want to hear about. And that’s what voters will hear about.
There may be somewhat different prescriptions about what to do about what is called the affordability crisis. But I do think if there’s one message you’re going to hear from the Democrats is that prices are too damn high, that it’s Trump’s fault, and that we have ways to address that. I expect a very unified message from Democrats about that. Whereas from Republicans, honestly, we’re in August, three months out from the election. I couldn’t tell you what a Republican candidate across the country is going to say to save themselves.
So, the midterms will be basically a referendum on Trump’s second presidency. Or do actual policy questions play a role?
I do believe that Trump will be a major, if not the major, subject of this election. Americans are deeply unhappy with the direction of our country—something which has long been predating Donald Trump. The last time that polls showed that more than half of the Americans were happy with the direction of our country was in 2003. So, this is a long-running trend, but it’s been accelerated by things like the concerns about affordability and inflation that I mentioned.
The other aspect is Trump himself. He’s always been a divisive persona, which is to say that both Democrats and Republicans focused on him, in part because the core Republican base liked him and the core Democratic base hated him. Therefore, they both had an incentive to talk about him. Now, something like two-thirds of Americans have soured on Trump’s presidency.
And I think it’s very interesting in this campaign that you are seeing some candidates make a connection between these issues of affordability and the issues of Trump’s personal corruption and the way he is running the country, which may turn out to be very effective for Trump’s opponents. They’re saying, “Donald Trump cares more about putting gold up on the walls of the White House and building a 250-foot-tall victory arch to himself than he does about the American people. He spends his time on projects to glorify himself and enrich his family and not on doing the business of the people.”
That, I think, is a very effective campaign tool—similar to the ones the opponents of Viktor Orbán in Hungary used, focusing on the personal corruption of the now former prime minister and the people surrounding him as a proxy for talking about the impoverishment of Hungary as a country and individual Hungarians.
How big would you say is the number of Republicans who secretly hope for a downer for the president, in order to eventually purge the party of Trumpism?
Well, after 10 years of the Republican Party in the United States being the Trump Republican Party, that number is far lower than you would believe. One of the trends here in Washington that may not be appreciated “outside of the beltway” is the extent to which Trump has consolidated power. Especially if they lose seats, the Republicans who remain in the House of Representatives and the Senate will be more “Trumpy.” So, ironically, Trump, as is often the way with autocrats, he wins both ways, right? He wins if the Democrats lose, because they are his opponents; but he also may win to a certain extent if the Democrats win because it enables him to consolidate power even further over one of our two parties.
And the US Senate is not the US Senate that it was 10 years ago when there were many outspoken Republican critics of Trump. Now there’s a couple of them who get outsized attention. But guess what, even those are total wimps, and they don’t really ever follow through. They offer mild words of criticism, but rarely vote against Trump, and they’re the ones who’ll be leaving the Senate now. One example is Susan Collins, who is a very vulnerable Republican senator of Maine, who may lose her seat because she’s stuck in between. She’s not Trumpy enough for the Trumpists, but she’s certainly not moderate enough for a state that’s gone Democrat in the last presidential election. It’s important to keep that part in mind.
You mentioned structural dysfunctions of the US system—what role will they play in the midterms and of course, also in the 2028 elections, be it gerrymandering or making voting more difficult for certain voter groups?
This is really important. It seems arcane, but it’s not. Since the beginning of his return to power last year, President Trump has ordered Republicans in federal states where they control the legislatures and the governorships to redraw the maps for congressional districts. Why did he do that? Because he was hoping to gain advantage, fearing that he couldn’t necessarily win in a fair election. And so, there’s been a whole round of that—something that’s never happened before in the US.
Every 10 years, there’s a round of redistricting; it’s supposed to reflect the population. But what happened over the past months is an incredible, unprecedented midterm redistricting. The Cook Political Report, published by a non-partisan analysis group, says that the advantage for the Republicans in all of that is probably eight to 10 seats. That’s not insignificant.
Right now, Democrats would seem to have a lock on winning back the House of Representatives. They only need about four seats to pick up. If you’ve given yourself another advantage of eight to 10 seats in addition to the four seats, it could mean perhaps not that Democrats lose the house, but maybe that they have a much smaller and possibly ungovernable majority.
But basically, it’s not a huge advantage and certainly one that Democrats can overcome. They are running very much ahead in terms of their voters’ enthusiasm and their motivation to come out. And this is not a perfect predictor, but in the primaries that we’ve had so far, about 57 percent of the votes have come from Democrats. That’s even more of an advantage than they had on that number in 2018.
However, the number of competitive seats in our system is ever more strongly veering toward zero. According to the Cook Political Report, there are only 18 toss-up seats—out of 435. When I was a young reporter covering Congress, there were a minimum of around 100 competitive seats. And even then, people thought that wasn’t that many.
And looking ahead to the next presidential elections: When I was a kid growing up, there was a very competitive race in 1976. About half of our states were considered to be toss-ups: 24. In most recent elections, there have been six toss-up states, and really only three: Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. We’ve seen the shrinking of the battleground because of the distortions in our system. And that means that control of the House is going to come down to a relatively small number of states where millions and millions of dollars are going to be spent.
Let’s imagine a surprise win for the Republicans in November. What would it mean for Europe?
If the Republicans manage to hold on to one or both Houses of Congress, Trump will feel this is a tremendous victory. Frankly, even if it’s a mixed result, he will spin this as “the greatest victory of all time.” And he will feel even less constrained by Congress than he does now.
That is one of the important facts about Trump’s return to power: He’s basically ignored the US Congress. I think that was one of the lessons he learned from his first term in office: that Congress is weak. That Congress doesn’t stand up for its institutional prerogatives and that his Republicans basically have embraced party over institution. And that is not what our founders who wrote our constitution had in mind.
And so, Trump has governed with almost no constraints on his power coming from the legislative branch. And I think he will be even more empowered to just ignore them. He doesn’t care if these senators don’t confirm his nominees, especially in his last two years in office. He’ll just say, well, I’d rather have them in an “acting” capacity, because then they’re even more accountable only to me, and not to anyone else. So, I think you would be looking at Trump on even more of a power trip than he is.
And if it comes to Europe: The Greenland drama is not going to be over until 12 noon on January 20, 2029.
When we look back at some point to this period of US history dominated by Trump, which part will the 2026 midterms play in it?
You know, anybody who tells you that they could have successfully forecast in 2020 where we would have been as a country six years later is not telling the truth. Even before the events of January 6, 2021, and the storming of the US Capitol, Donald Trump had disgraced himself in ways that seemed unrecoverable for any politician.
So, no prediction that you get from anybody right now about American politics would be worthwhile. That being said, there are so many respects in which Trump is a historical outlier to our country. Not only have we never elected this kind of demagogue to the highest office in the land, but also the degree of personal enrichment and aggrandizement of an almost kingly set of powers is something that stands starkly at odds with the long sweep of American history.
Where you see a trajectory in American history, however, there are two respects that don’t necessarily auger all that well. Number one is the trend of polarization. Frankly, it’s the political trend of my lifetime, and it is only accelerated in many respects. One question to watch is: Is there the possibility of reaching a high-water mark of that polarization where a reaction then sets in? So, that’s one very important question.
Number two is the expansion of executive power. The great historian Arthur Schlesinger wrote a book called “The Imperial Presidency” in 1973, when I was a baby—decades ago and far predating the Trump presidencies. The fact that Trump has accelerated the concept and taken it to places we didn’t imagine is not the outlier that it might seem to be, just because he’s so personally outlandish and putting a kind of golden crown on his head. But the truth is that it is actually consistent with the long-term direction of the American presidency under Democrats and Republicans, in part because we have a Supreme Court that has very much gone along with it and embraced the program of elevating the executive at the expense of the other branches of government.
So, the question is: Will those long-term trends continue, or will they reach some turning points?
The interview was conducted by the IP/Q editorial team.
