Transcript: Fed Chair Drops Hammer on Angry Trump as Poll Drop Worsens

Downie: Yeah, I think that’s certainly part of it. Trump is also looking for any lever he can to prevent the House, prevent the Judiciary Committee, the Oversight Committee, those sorts of committees from having subpoena power to conduct hearings and so forth. In terms of where it’s most likely, I think that California, yeah, [is] certainly most likely, especially in terms of the number of seats that they could maybe free up. Obviously, there are some hurdles there in terms of a redistricting commission and getting around that. The difficulty for Democrats, in short, is that there aren’t as many states with Democratic governors and state legislatures, and those that do have those more of them are already heavily Democratic in their congressional makeup. So there are fewer seats that you can just basically recalibrate the maps to find. But I do think, though, that even if you add five seats, it’s still a fairly small margin for the Republicans. Right now, we’re talking [about], before vacancies are filled, a couple of seats. You add five seats; that’s still less than 10. And many, many midterms have seen—more midterms than not—have seen the party not in control of the White House take double-digit seats in the House. So yeah, certainly, I think Trump is scared. He doesn’t want the House to be able to investigate him, and he’ll do anything he can. But that doesn’t mean that Democrats should be cowed by it.

Sargent: At the end of the day, I think Democrats are going to realize that they’re going to have to fight fire with fire here and do what they have to do in whatever state that they can. This is an area where they shouldn’t count on the fundamentals to give them 40 seats or whatever and should treat this as an absolute dogfight for every inch of territory—yet at the same time, keeping in mind that Trump is weak, that all the fundamentals are working against them so that they don’t hamstring themselves in other ways. It’s a bit of a delicate balancing act. I feel like Democrats are feeling their way toward the right position. What do you think?

Downie: I think that they’re getting there. Again, as we talked about earlier, the base is already there. In the NBC poll, it flipped from … in 2017, one-third of Democratic voters said they prefer Democratic lawmakers to hold to their principles and not compromise with Trump, and now it’s two-thirds saying that. And the closer we get to 2028 and the more you have ambitious—particularly—governors but also some senators and representatives, the more you have some of these very ambitious folks attracting more and more attention. They know what the base wants, and they’re going to start showing more and more fight.