Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
The longtime labor strategist Michael Podhorzer has a good new piece on his Substack, Weekend Reading, arguing that the polling evidence is now clear: Trump won in 2024 because voters either didn’t know what he was promising to do or didn’t believe those promises. So we’re talking about all this today. Good to have you on, Michael.
Sargent: Trump met with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa at the White House Wednesday and journalists were in attendance. Let’s start here. Trump was asked about the news that the administration will accept a $400 million luxury jet from Qatar, but Trump wanted to talk about the fake “white genocide” in South Africa—so he lost his temper. Listen to this.
Sargent: Michael, this is not someone who is aware of how the public perceives his corruption, is it?
Sargent: Yes, your piece gets at that very well. Your piece argues that the public really just didn’t believe that Donald Trump would do the things that he said he was going to do. And corruption is one of them. He was open and very clear about the fact that he was going to rule in a corrupt way. He promised roomfuls of financiers and Big Oil executives that he would keep their taxes low and do policy their way, and then ask them in the next breath to raise huge amounts of money for him. That’s about as clear as you can be, right? Didn’t Trump essentially say during the campaign, I’m going to be corrupt? And didn’t the public simply not believe him?
Sargent: Elites really failed us here. I want to focus on another moment from this Trump presser. Trump was asked why he’s letting in white South Africans while suspending refugee resettlement from everywhere else in the world. Listen to this.
Trump (audio voiceover): Well, this is a group, NBC, that is truly fake news. They ask a lot of questions in a very pointed way. They’re not questions, they’re statements. We’ve had tremendous complaints about Africa, about other countries, too, from people. They say there’s a lot of bad things going on in Africa, and that’s what we’re going to be discussing today. When you say we don’t take others, all you have to do is take look at the Southern border. We let 21 million people come through our border. Totally unchecked, totally unvetted.
Podhorzer: I think that that is definitely a part of it. But I also think that what we’ve learned from scholars of authoritarians, like Ruth Ben-Ghiat and others, is that this is also part of a strategy to enforce their control—to say things that are objectionable because it divides people. And the more your supporters have to go along with your obviously horrible or untrue things, the more loyal to you they become, because they’ve bought into it. And so what he did there in the Oval Office is not much different from what any of the other world authoritarians do. It’s a bullying move. But you’re right, too: I think he doesn’t appreciate what a majority of Americans think ever.
Podhorzer: Well, this is the tricky thing about being in America. He may think his base is larger than it is—but in America, it doesn’t have to be a majority anymore. And as long as it’s willing to be 100 percent there for you all the time, the question isn’t, “Is it a majority?” It’s, “Is it enough?” And right now, it’s still enough.
Podhorzer: Well, I think that just shy of half of the population of the voters did. That’s the state of play, right? It just needed a few more to believe that, and we wouldn’t be in this dystopia now. It’s really important to realize that in this moment, when we’re being reminded of what a disaster the decision that Biden made to try to seek reelection [was]—that’s been documented in the new book, Original Sin—and as we remember how in other countries, the governing party suffered much bigger losses because of inflation and all that, the reason it was as close as it was wasn’t because people love Democrats. We see that right now where their approval ratings are the worst ever. It’s that about half of the people who went out and voted were that disturbed at the possibility of a second Trump term. And if there had been maybe like one in 50 people who had voted for Trump who decided, No, I don’t want this again, he loses, right? It was that close.
The new Marquette Law School national poll, which is a gold standard survey, had some really striking numbers on immigration. While a majority overall generally approves of his handling of border security, we have an even split 50–50 on immigration generally. But here’s where it gets interesting: In Marquette polling, majorities oppose deporting longtime residents without criminal records, and only 38 percent of independents approve of his handling of immigration while 62 percent disapprove. Those are striking numbers.
Podhorzer: No, absolutely not. And as I [noted] in the piece, and actually more importantly in a couple of pieces I wrote before the election, polling on those specific questions even then was against the things you’re talking about. It’s not as if suddenly when it happened, people changed their mind about whether or not people who’d lived here without a criminal record should be able to stay; that has always been true. But because of the way the media designs its Marquette polls before the election, in this bizarre way, there’s a sense that if you actually say in the question what he’s going to do in an accurate way, you’re being partisan. And so that means the only questions you get is, Who’s better on immigration? Anyone who wanted to could see before the election that a majority of Americans feel exactly the way you just rattled off. That hasn’t changed. And it was the insistence of the Marquette national media polls, and the people who covered them, to not want to seem like partisans by going any deeper. They just stuck with this very simplistic, Who’s better on the economy? and not, Do you support tariffs that’ll mean that your kid only gets three Barbies or something? or that you’re going to be deported—or even more to the point, that you won’t have due process—even though those were all things he said.
Podhorzer: Absolutely. But again, if it didn’t take it to happening to have people change their mind or rethink it. In one of The New York Times polls in either September or October where they asked people, “Do you support mass deportation?” plurality or majority did. They also asked, but didn’t really give equal weight in the reporting, to a question about whether or not there should be a path to citizenship for people who’ve been here and not violated the law and paid their taxes, and an even bigger majority were for that, right? But we didn’t hear about that then, because it would get in the way of the story of America moving right.
Podhorzer: Yeah, absolutely. Again, it’s really such a tragic abdication of institutions that are provided from the Constitution—through freedom of the press, freedom of speech, and freedom of assembly—that civil society that rests on that did not use those constitutional rights ahead of the election to inform the public. When you think about what is happening now to this country, what’s being broken in ways that are not going to be fixed, right? And you think about how much money gets spent for this or that little niche issue, or how much time member of Congress does this or that. In fact, 2024 was about whether or not we’re just going to shred the Constitution, right? Almost no one was behaving as if that was actually going to be our future. And you were, and a number of other people.... It is cringey sometimes to be in a crowd when you yelled fire and everyone just looked the other way. But that’s what everyone needed to do.
Podhorzer: There are no polls that say otherwise. And I’m not a fan of the polling precision, but it just makes sense, right? In terms of the midterms, there are a couple components to the answer. The first is: What kind of midterms are they going to be? As you know, through executive orders, Republicans in Congress are trying to intervene and change the rules for our elections—by making it more difficult for certain people to vote, by really withdrawing from trying to protect elections from getting hacked. All sorts of ways. We will again, in November, cast ballots, but whether it’s going to be on the terms we ever have is still an open question.
Sargent: And you’ve been really terrific at bringing that out. Folks, if you enjoyed this conversation, make sure to check out Michael Podhorzer’s Substack Weekend Reading. Michael, thanks so much for coming on. It’s always a pleasure to talk to you.
Sargent: You’ve been listening to The Daily Blast with me, your host, Greg Sargent. The Daily Blast is a New Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler and the DSR Network.
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